History of Bible Interpretation
Vern Peterman · Jul 27, 2003
Church History, No. 04
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/48262257292683

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Got it. Why does it matter? Why does it make a difference whether you interpret literally or allegorically? Yeah. This is what it says. And what's real interesting, we'll see how that got turned upside down here pretty shortly. But the idea in literal interpretation, we're asking, what does the text say? Okay? Allegorical interpretation is not what does the text say, but what is the other meaning that's not in the text? Okay? All right, now, let's take an example. In a literal understanding of scripture, we see this.

Christ's second coming is literally going to take place, okay? Christ will come to earth to reign for a thousand years, and you can find several passages that will point to that. These are just some examples. Allegorical interpretation, and we'll see where this comes from shortly, Christ's second coming refers to his coming into the hearts and minds of those in the church, reigning through the church. Okay, that's Christ's second coming. Or, here's another one.

Christ came already in 70 AD. in judgment against the Jews, and there are groups that teach that. Both of those are examples of allegorical teaching that some groups hold to right now, as well as in time past. You see the difference there? There's a distinction.

One thing you notice, the literal interpretation basically has one definition. The allegorical interpretation, these are just a couple of examples of the ways you could take it. What we're going to do, you have a chart, looks just like this, okay? And what we'd like to do is to track through it initially because I want us to get a general introduction about where we're going here, and then we'll delve into details, okay? What you'll see on this chart is there'll be literal interpretation of scripture on the top, allegorical interpretation on the bottom, and the copy that you have should also be in color, okay?

On the top part, and I've got the chart starting at 1000 B.C. The fact is that the Old Testament authors wrote in centuries before 1000. Question? Yeah, last page of today's handout. Okay? Now, at any rate, what you see there is the first band is the authors of the Old Testament ending roughly 400 B.C. They wrote Ezra and the scribes that he kind of established carried on literal interpretation of scripture, and they were very careful with the text that they copied. That pattern went on.

We know that Christ and the apostles interpreted things literally. For example, we had that point earlier, Christ's second coming, literal versus allegorical. Acts chapter one, verse six, the apostles, they come to Jesus and they ask the question and they're, they're understanding things literally.

They said, are you now going to establish your kingdom? They're looking for a literal kingdom to be established. And he said, you know, now it's not the time. Okay. And I'm not the one to say that, but, and then he tells them that you shall receive power and the Holy Spirit has come upon you. Now's not the time for that. This is the beginning of the church age.

But literal, if you look at things, things were taken literally. Now, as you go in there, churches in Syria and in Asia Minor were the ones to continue that most into the following centuries. Even they got overwhelmed. And then we'll see later on that the Jews, a few Roman Catholics, and some oppressed churches continued on literal interpretation. And then some Protestants and Jews carry on literal interpretation into the present.

That's the literal interpretation side. The other one is the allegorical side, the bottom half of your chart. And what we'll see here is that allegorical interpretation started with Greek skeptics who did not believe the Greek myths. That's where it started.

And it got carried into Philo, who was actually a Jew, Origen, the first Christian major proponent of allegorical interpretation, and then carried into the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches. When the Reformation took place, the Reformers said, Scripture only, and so they made Scripture a basis of authority, and they established doctrines particularly regarding salvation. But when it came to prophecy, And when it came to identifying Israel, they maintained allegorical interpretation just as they had it from the Catholic Church. That was their training and background. Okay, that's the quick summary. What we see here is these are side-by-side in your chart.

From here on out, we're just going to be delving into more details, but I want you to have that kind of in mind as this is the big picture, so you don't get lost in the details. Okay so far? Yes. Okay. Prophecy and the identification of the church with Israel, those are the key elements that got continued on in the Reformed, Lutheran, Presbyterian, that period's churches. Okay.

Now, the setup for church interpretation started with the writing of the Old Testament, and this kind of clarifies something that is shortened on your chart there, and that is basically the writing of the Old Testament, starting with Moses and continuing on into the time, actually with Malachi being the end of it, but that time of Ezra where he's pulling a lot of the Old Testament documents together and copying them and recording and reading them.

What you see is literal interpretation was carried into the New Testament times. Basically, Ezra put things in place, that literal interpretation was carried. Now, in saying so, I need to clarify one thing. Yes, there was some allegorical interpretation. It tended to be around the edges and in Jews who were in other areas, as we'll see in a little bit.

But the main core of Judaism stayed with literal interpretation. Even to this day, more than 2,000 years later, Orthodox Jews believe in a literal seven-year tribulation period at the end of which the Messiah comes and then he reigns for a long period of time after that. So they interpret the Old Testament literally.

Alright, the Greek myths written by Homer, I say Homer and because scholars debate as to who the other authors were even if there was more than one Homer. But we won't argue with that. The main point is These Greek myths started about the time of David and were written in the time following, and then Plato and a number of other Greek philosophers began to question the validity of these myths, and they said, no, really, these are just allegories. So they began the allegorical interpretation.

They are the ones that started it. Notice something here. Remember, we went through this map before, and it showed here's the Alexander the Great's empire, and you see off to the left side there, there's Alexandria at the north end of Egypt. Okay? So you see that pattern.

Remember what Alexander the Great did. He didn't just take over militarily. He also established Greek culture and philosophy where he went as well. And guess who Alexandria is named after. Okay? So that makes Here's a map that you have a closer version of in your set. Alexandria there is right at the top, right at the west end of the Nile Delta. Alright, Alexandria is pivotal here and here's why. Alexander the Great established this colony in order to put Greek culture and philosophy in place.

And then the other thing that's real interesting, a substantial number of Greek-speaking Jews came into the city of Alexandria and established a colony there. And what happened eventually is they really lost touch with the Hebrew language, and so around the year 200 B.C. the Old Testament was translated into Greek. Originally being in Hebrew, translated into Greek. And by the way, there were Hebrew-speaking Jews who did not like this, but nonetheless that was what was adapted.

Philo is a Jew living in the Jewish colony in Alexandria, 20 BC to 54 AD. So that crosses over into the New Testament period, doesn't it? Something else about that, what do you see? 20 BC to 54 AD, remember Joseph and Mary and Jesus went down into where?

Egypt. And it doesn't say anymore beyond that. Good chance. that they were here because this is the largest colony of Jews in Egypt. So good chance that they're there at the same time as Philo was. So he started this allegorical interpretation. Here's what that looks like.

He explains Genesis 2.24 for us.

For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and they shall become one flesh. So far so good, right? Look at what he does to it. On account of the external sensation, the mind, when it has become enslaved to it, shall leave both its father, the God of the universe, and the mother of all things, namely the virtue and wisdom in God, and, pleased to him, becomes united to the external sensations, and is dissolved into the external sensations, so that the two become one flesh and one passion."

Oh my. Okay? This is what he did. And so what happened is he took the Greek allegorical interpretive method and applied it to scripture. That Greek allegorical method was based upon the Greeks not believing their myths. So now what we're doing is we're applying an interpretive method that is based on not believing what's written. How about that? I don't believe what I'm seeing, I don't believe what I'm reading, and so I'll interpret it allegorically. Crack me on that because this gets amazing.

Now, in Israel, while Philo was still a teenager, here's Matthew 2, 1-6. This is the story of, in the account in Matthew, the Magi come to Herod. They say, where is the king of the Jews born? And so Herod, you know, he doesn't know the scripture. What does he do? He gathers together all the scholars, and so here's the test.

Do they interpret things literally, or do they do what Philo just did? Here's verses 5 and 6. They said to him in Bethlehem of Judea, For this is what is written by the prophet." That's referencing Micah 5, 2. Did they take it literally or figuratively or allegorically? They took it literally, didn't they? They said, it says here Bethlehem? Yep. Alright, that's where he's going to be born. Literally. Not some kind of story about how this means something else. Okay. Now. Let's take a look here. Meanwhile, back in Israel. Okay?

Jesus calls his disciples. was crucified, buried, resurrected, ascended. The church begins there at the Day of Pentecost and spreads there as described in Acts 1-8. Then, the apostles in the early church interpreted scripture literally as the Jews in Israel interpreted the Old Testament, for the most part, especially the Pharisees. And here's something to think about. Matthew 23, Jesus Just, he goes and lays out seven woes for the Pharisees.

It's not that he's terribly impressed with these people. Notice that among the seven things that he lists, not one of them is scolding them for their method of interpretation. Their literal interpretation, he doesn't go at them for that. Other things, yes, but not that. Okay? Alright, now. These are the second century.

Most of the Church, And I mean a great majority of the church believed in a literal thousand-year reign of the Messiah, the Second Coming. These were called Chiliasts, and that doesn't mean that they really liked chili. It's not a contraction for chili enthusiasts, okay? It's because the original word there meaning one thousand, okay? Now, but Justin Martyr, here he lives right, you know, at the beginning and into the good portion of the second century. He even said anybody who doesn't believe in a literal 1,000 year reign is a heretic. But the same guy said that the church is a replacement for Israel. So he's mixing his interpretive methods, or starting to, isn't he? Okay, here's the trend.

The Jewish use of Philo's allegorical method went down. That was not terribly well received by the Jews. They said, this doesn't wash. But, odd thing, for the Christians, the use of philosophical methods increased during that same period of time. It grew in popularity among the Christians.

Here's one reason why. One reason why is because for them it was a way to set aside the law. not understanding that that's not how you do it. They could read the law and they'd just say it's allegory. It wasn't what was intended, was it? That that was their means of justifying it.

Okay. You have different schools of thought developing. On the one, you've got the school of Asia Minor, Irenaeus. Irenaeus wrote a treatise and he wrote, you know, interpret literally, interpret literally, interpret literally. I mean, he just was adamant. On the other hand, you have the School of Alexandria, we'll be looking at for a minute.

They said, interpret allegorically, interpret allegorically, okay? And then on the West End, you have Tertullian and his group. Tertullian was an attorney by training, Latin, and so you have more of a different cultural shade there, but still not the allegorical interpretation of Alexandria. Okay, now this is pivotal. Look at this, because here's how Clement of Alexandria thought of things.

He saw on the one hand, I've got from the Hebrews, I get the law. And of course, alongside that, he said, you know, from, I get the, I have the scripture. And so he said, God inspired scripture. But what he also said is God inspired Greek philosophy. You see the distinction there? Inspiring scripture is fine.

But inspiring Greek philosophy is a problem, because what he did is he made a second basis of authority, and had to try to weld those two together. So here's his disciple, Origen, comes along, and Origen's the one that really propounded this well, even traveled to different places to lay it out. Okay, Origen extended it and established it as the valid approach for the Church, He questioned the authenticity of the Book of Revelation, but interpreted it allegorically. He went ahead and interpreted it anyway.

He even said that the reason that the Jews didn't see Jesus in Scripture is because they didn't interpret allegorically. Now you're starting to get something upside down. Remember, the Greeks came up with their interpretive method because they didn't believe what they were reading. And so Origen adopts that. and then accused the Jews for not believing because they didn't use the Greek skeptic method. This is really twisted, but that's how it got started. Origen had several views here, I want to look at a few of them.

Matthew 24, 30 is where Christ describes himself as coming through the clouds in the second coming. He's going to establish his kingdom. Origen thought on that, that that's the passage referring to the coming of Christ into the souls. of those of the open-hearted when they accept the truth of Scripture, allegorically of course. He said that the verses in the Second Coming referred to the mature believers seeing Christ in the hidden allegorical meanings of Scripture.

Origen had various other ideas, we won't take the time to go into it, but he even thought that after a while Satan would eventually be forgiven. Here's some more things. The tribulation period judgments described in Revelation 6-19 were not literal events that are yet to take place, but a description of the struggles a person goes through as they come to union with Christ. Sound good? Oh boy. Matthew 24-40, where two men are laboring in the field, one taking one lap, represents the good and bad influences on a person's will. Are they laughing yet? I don't understand. Okay, anyway, I think it's comical. All right.

Any passage not allegorized was still immature and not yet spiritual. Ah, you see that? It's okay to read the literal understanding, but understand that if that's all you see, Wordsom taught, that that was immature. That's spiritually immature and it's going to leave you in an immature state if you don't allegorize it. That was what he taught. Now, this guy John Cassian took this one step further and he laid out, here's how we allegorize, okay? He laid out a system. He said we got this fourfold sense here, historical, that's the literal meaning, okay?

It's okay to have that, but that's just the place to start. The point being, yeah, you go ahead and read it for what it literally says, but I understand you haven't gotten spiritual until you've allegorized it, okay? So, the second thing he says is allegorical has a figurative meaning, and we'll look, by the way, at examples of that so it makes more sense. Topological has a moral meaning. Every text has a moral meaning. Every text has a figurative meaning. And, anagogical. There's a heavenly or secret meaning. So you've got to get all those meanings out of every text of every scripture. Always.

And if you haven't done that, you haven't interpreted properly. Yeah, I'm afraid not. But yeah, he was essentially what he was doing was adding to Scripture and what he was doing. Yeah, yeah. It went on and on. Yeah, what does it really say? And to him, that was just a place to start. Here's the way he explained it. The letter teaches events, that's history, okay? What you believe is by allegory. Now you've got some spiritual content, okay? The moral is what you do, and where you're headed is by analogy, okay?

That was his idea. We'll see in about two slides, we'll get an example to get an idea of what is this guy talking about, okay? Augustine, here. He was a very influential church leader. He basically adapted and adopted Cassian's approach here. He authored The City of God, which we'll see in just the next slide, was all based on his four levels of allegory, or four levels of interpretation, which included allegory. Basically, this is an important point to look at.

Given the church's growing status in the Roman Empire, point one, and two, the allegorical interpretation of prophecy, there was no basis for expecting Christ's literal imminent return. It was starting to get pushed off. Why worry about Christ coming back? We've got the kingdom here, we've got the reigns of the government, and the church is living out Christ's kingdom, so we're not really concerned about Christ coming. really enter into our thinking principally. The kingdom of the church was already established on the earth. Yeah, there have been people who have tried to put that together and put a thousand years back into it.

Yes. Now here's an example of this fourfold sense. Here's the city of God, and this is an ancient copy of it, one page of it. Here's the fourfold sense of this understanding of the city of Jerusalem. Just take something simple so we can understand what these people are talking about. Historical is the literal city of the Jews, Jerusalem as we know it now. The allegorical interpretation was that means the Church of Christ. The topological means the human soul. And the anagogical is the heavenly city.

So every time you read Jerusalem, you've got to see all four levels. All the time. Every time. That's an example of how you have these multiple levels of interpretation, and unless you had the last three, you didn't understand it. One of the problems with the allegorical interpretation is there's no way to control or check the interpretation. One of the allegorical teachers in this time, for example, said that the seven sons of Job stood for the twelve apostles. I get that, but that's what they made it say. There's an allegorical interpretation. We might chuckle a little bit. For them it was, no, sure, of course. But the point being, there's no way to control it. How wild can you get? Who knows? The last bastions of literal interpretation from the apostolic and early church there were in Syria and Asia Minor. Basically those got pulled into the orthodox churches so that literal interpretation was lost. Virtually all the orthodox churches just shifted over towards allegorical interpretation. Alright, now, stepping into around the year 600 here, Gregory the Great, the first one to be called Pope, is coming onto the scene.

The Latin Vulgate has declared the Inspired Bible at this point in time. So now when I'm interpreting literally and allegorically, I'm using the Latin Bible to do so. I'm no longer putting a priority on understanding Greek or Hebrew. Now I can go to Latin, so I've got a translation apart. The fourfold sense was established as a standard interpretive approach in the church. We're going to always do it this way. That was the idea. It was well established.

And then as time went on, the organized church was increasingly made the channel of God's grace. See, what had happened is instead it was say, instead of believers saying, come to Christ, okay, and respond in faith to him. Instead, the church put itself as the channel in the path. This church here has got, we've got the right ordinances to go through. We've got the right steps. You don't get forgiveness and salvation outside of this. particular organization. That was the drift that things went on.

A couple weeks back you got kind of a list of how things were sequenced and timed in terms of doctrines that were in place in the Roman Catholic Church. The various ideas of transubstantiation and their indulgences and things like that. Many of those teachings are less than a thousand years old. Centuries went by after the first guy who was called Pope before a lot of these teachings that we take for granted now actually became the standard teachings. And then the other trend, there was scripture that was supplemented by church tradition and authority.

So you had both of those alongside each other. During this Middle Ages period, this medieval period there, You had islands of literal interpretation, and we're going to look a little bit more at this when we get some of the movements this next week. But we had one fellow, Nicholas of Lyra, who studied the Old Testament in Hebrew. He didn't know any Greek, but that was one example where he'd look at the original language and study that.

There was St. Victor Abbey, and that's the picture there on the right, that had Hugo and a couple of his pupils that taught literal interpretation, but they were mystics. So they essentially lost it. Yes? No. No. No. No. Different deal. You're thinking of the French Calvinist, which is a later thing. Yeah. Yes?

Gregory the Great was the first pope. 590 was the time he came into the into the position of the Bishop of Rome, and he gave the title of Pope at first to him. And then finally, the Orthodox Jews, and this particular one that's well known, Rashi, also maintained literal interpretation. This is a strange thing, the Orthodox Jews maintained literal interpretation better than the Christian churches during this period of time.

Alright, now we're stepping into the Reformation. I've talked in the past about the printing press, the impact of the printing press, and printing Greek and Hebrew scripture texts, and things that you could study the Bible with, basically. Bible study tools. A growing interest in ancient languages, and now here the people were able to study for themselves the original Greek and Hebrew, and look at it, and as they did so, there was a reaction to the moral and intellectual decline of the Roman Catholic Church, and then a counter-reaction.

The original reformers, a great many of them were not intending on starting anything new. They simply wanted to reform the church that was there. It was the counter-reaction that drove them to start something new. They didn't start out and say, you know, let's start a new church. It was only when they saw the reaction that came out of the Roman Catholic Church that it initiated these movements. We've seen this before, but I want to focus on there.

What was new was their basis of authority, scripture. So they began to look particularly at scripture. And then the next part that goes with it, personal Bible study and interpretation. The idea that you personally could study the Bible and learn what it says and apply it. That was a rather radical thing to be hitting Europe widespread. And they had not just complete Bibles, but also just Bible study pamphlets or write-ups on a particular topic. You know, the Bible says this, and they'd print that up and send that all over Europe.

And finally, though, what was unchanged was the allegorical interpretation of much of Scripture. This is a question Tom was asking about, basically, it's prophecy and the understanding that Israel was being replaced by the Church. That lack of understanding that carried over the allegorical interpretation of the Catholic Church that started back with Origen, that started before that back with the Greek skeptics who didn't believe what they were reading. That's what got carried over.

A few quotes from Martin Luther. I won't go over it all because you've got this on your handout, actually two pages of it. His focus in these two pages is basically focus on the original languages, getting back to the original languages. Why? It was his own study of the original Greek text of Romans and Galatians that turned his thinking upside down. And there are some things we wish he understood better, but what he understood about salvation was a huge change compared to what he had understood before.

The thing to see is, basically, once people began reading scripture, Europe just roiled and rolled. It was just a boiling that took place throughout Europe once that took place. And it drove people over to America. People either sought freedom in freer areas of Europe, or they sought freedom in America. And both of those took place basically for the next two and a little bit more centuries. That movement continued to take place. Just looking at my own kind of family background, I can point at a couple different places where that happened.

Robert Jennison was an Anglican clergyman in Colchester, England. And he decided, hey, when I read the Bible, that's not what we're teaching. And so they said, that's fine, you're gone. Anyway, that's one of my ancestors, came over during the 1600s. But that was just a massive pattern, and that drove a great many of the people that initially colonized the Americas, drove them there in order to find liberty and freedom to actually study the Bible and believe it and practice it as they saw it.

Now, there was also another shift taking place, and that is there was an increasing tendency in some circles to interpret scripture literally, and so they started off writing commentaries and things of that sort. John Gill, for example, has a commentary. You can get it online if you want, and he writes about the Rapture. He writes about the Rapture, which was something that previously any evidence or mention of that got repressed quick. There was also an ability to publish things and sell them, send them out. put them into different places. Okay.

When you get into this next segment of time, this is the 1648 time when the Peace of Westphalia was established, there was all kinds of interpretations that began to abound. See, the one thing that happened in the Church is the Church had never really, at the outset, had never really set on and stayed with the apostolic, literal understanding of scripture. It started deviating, and so now it goes all over the place. We'll step through that.

I've broken it up into five categories, and there are some people who would probably look at it and say, oh boy, I'm not sure they agree with that, but we'll go over that in a minute here. Skeptical, liberal, cultic, reformed, and dispensational. Interpretations of scripture. The skeptical approach And I've given a few examples, Voltaire, Marx, and more recently in our own time, O'Hare, Madeleine Marie O'Hare.

For them, there's no reason to allegorize. Why? It's because the God of the Bible doesn't exist, or we can't know that he is there, or there is a God, but the God of the Bible isn't the right one. And so the skeptical approach doesn't need to allegorize, because they don't take the text of scripture literally in the first place.

Why do I need to find a meaning from it? It's either one, just a bunch of myths and fables, or two, it's just all fabrication. Or an historical accident. So for the skeptic, they're going to interpret things that way. For the liberal, and by the way, I've given a couple examples here, but probably Bart would be crawling, you know, his skin would crawl for me to call him a liberal, but I'm going to go ahead and lump it that way anyway.

The basic idea here is that it fails to take scripture seriously, and a lot of the focus ends up lying in emotions and validating experience. The literal interpretation isn't essential. It doesn't matter. This is where you can take a leap of faith because you can't base anything on what's in scripture. Scripture may or may not be historically true, but for this perspective, it doesn't matter anyway because the real experience is something that you feel subject to.

The next one is cultic. I give an early example of the Shakers here in America. By the way, it's really odd. A lot of the cults start here in America. It is not, anyway. Allegorical interpretations allow the Bible to be made to apply specifically to the occult group, and to mean what the cult says it means. Remember we said that allegorical interpretation is a problem because there's no way to test it? How do I know this is the right interpretation? How do I check it? There isn't any way to tell. So, almost as a rule, cult groups like allegorical interpretation.

They like to allegorize because they can make the allegory fit them. And because they've allegorized, they can maintain control using the allegory. They control the allegory. They control the interpretation. So if you go through the different groups that Jehovah's Witnesses allegorize, Mormonism allegorizes, okay? You go down to any of the major or minor cults, they allegorize left and right. because it's easier for them to make it say what they want to say, and it's easier for them to maintain control. Make sense? Okay.

The next group here is the Reformed group. They take prophetic passages on those referring to Israel. Basically, they've taken the interpretive method from the time of the Reformation and kind of locked it in place. Some variation, but basically held that interpretive approach. So they keep that aspect of Roman Catholic allegorical interpretation, even if they interpret other areas, they have to do it in salvation, literally. So they have a kind of a mixed method. It's literal unless it's prophetic. It's literal unless it's talking about Israel. And then you apply allegory. So it's do one or the other.

And they try to blend those two together. The places and where they draw that line makes for the different groups among the Reformed folks. Where do you draw the line on where allegory starts and stops? Some Reformed folks are fairly literal in their understanding, and some allegorize much more. And so there's a range in there, depending on where you draw the line, literal or allegorical.

And the last is dispensational. Interpret Scripture literally so that Israel is Israel and the Church is the Church. Allegories are clearly allegories. Example, here's in Galatians 4, 21-31, what does Paul say? This is an allegory, okay? He lets you know, I'm making an allegory. But that's not the same as looking at every text of Scripture and forcing an allegory on the text. See the difference there? If there is an allegory, it shows up in the text, and an allegory is intended. That's different from allegorizing every text of Scripture that you see.

Okay, go back to the account here. What we see here is you have a choice. You can either interpret Scripture literally, you can either interpret Scripture for what it says, and basically you're asking the question, what does the text say? Or you can take on some element of allegory, either do like Cassian did and say everything's allegory, or you can do as has been done in a great number of the Protestant churches and say this portion of it's allegory. So allegory for this part, literal for this other part, and then argue amongst themselves as to where to draw the line. Basically Christians have that choice and distinction which way they go.

Next week we'll be taking a look at the groups and movements and how you've got different denominations. Some of the latest numbers I've seen, initially I've seen numbers of 20,000 plus different denominations. And by that sometimes you're talking about small churches that have their own particular and unique things and stand apart. But, and some have even increased that number.

I've seen a number, one religious specialist actually came up with a 33,000 figure by the time they divided it all up. Lots of different ranges of interpretation, but one of the main reasons, it's not the only, but one of the main reasons for all that number is this.

When you get into allegorical interpretation, there is no control. You've lost And because you've lost it, you're no longer asking, what does the text say? Because the allegorical interpreter says, it doesn't mean what it says, it means something else. So, you've lost it.

This is why, you know, as we look at this, I asked the question earlier, what difference does it make? What difference it makes is a couple of things. One is, I really, personally, I want to know what the text says. And two, I want to interpret it the way Jesus and the Apostles intended it to be interpreted, and not come up with something. I most certainly don't want to use something that the Greeks came up with because they didn't believe what they were reading. I want to believe what I'm reading. And this is an important distinction.

The truth is, let me step back through here, most of what we'd call Christendom is down here. Most of Christendom is down here. If you look at the different groups, we've got the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches are allegorical in varying degrees. The Reformed, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Anglican, and Methodist churches are often the allegorical end. Those churches are applying ranges of allegorical interpretation as they look at Scripture.

If we're looking at interpreting scripture literally and saying, what does the text say, and looking at it with that perspective, we're going to stand apart from an awful lot of those who call themselves Christians. Isn't that amazing? This ties in with, and we'll be looking at next, at the history of groups, movements, and organizations, because one of the things we're going to find is that where churches divided off one of the things, and it's only one, but one of the things that caused them to break into different groups is different approaches to interpretation. Do I take this literally or not? Do I take it literally or not?

If you look at a great many, for example, and we'll take a look at it in detail, the Presbyterian church, It's got folks who take an amillennial view, a very allegorical view, a postmillennial view, also allegorical, but there's actually a Bible Presbyterian Church that looks at a future seven-year tribulation and a thousand-year reign. So you've got a wide range of beliefs about how literal do I take Scripture within what that group you call the Presbyterian Church. And so even within what we would call, well, that's a denominational group, there can be a real wide spectrum depending on how they look at Scripture and where they divide them. Questions? Yeah.

The thing that they will allegorize is anything prophetic, and so you'll find Revelation, of course, but also other aspects of some portions of the New Testament, and then especially if you get into the Old Testament prophecies. Basically, there's about 10,000 prophecies in Scripture. About 5,000 of those have been fulfilled. They're inclined to look at the fulfilled ones as literal, and the ones that are not fulfilled as allegorical.

Does that make sense? What's interesting is there's actually more prophecy in the Bible related to Christ's second coming than the first coming. And so what that says is that they're going to look at a good chunk of prophetic scriptures, anything yet to take place, as we would see it, as being some degree of allegory. Does that make sense?

Right. Where they would take a different tact tends to have more with their traditions of interpretation. I've done a study, for example, on the teaching of one nature versus two nature. The one nature teaching tends to be more in the Reformed camp. Not totally, but more in the Reform camp, and tends to have come out of that. So that would be one example. The Calvinist view, which tends to reflect more the Reform and Presbyterian view, for example, would say that Christ died only for the elect.

But that's not necessarily an allegorical interpretation, as much as it is a set of presuppositions that they're putting on the text. They have to insert words from certain Bible passages in order for that to come across. Now, anything else? Enough, enough? OK, let's pray.

Lord, as we look at this, we thank you for your Word. We thank you that we can take you at your Word, and that you're faithful and reliable, You did not intend obscurity to keep us from understanding what you had to say, but instead you revealed by intention, and you revealed with clarity. We thank you for that, and we give you praise. We ask that our hearts and minds would be drawn to the truth of your Word, and even more the Savior that is revealed in us.