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Re: Prodigal Son Distorted by FB Pastor
Allegories
Battles between spiritual and literal go bak to the first few centuries after Christ. Numerous early Christian scholars felt that the OT would only be relevant if it spoke directly of Christ. To those developed a system of interpretation that acknowledged a "literal" meaning of the text, but then encouraged the interpreter to look for the deeper, fuller, spiritual meaning below the surface of the text. Some settled for a two-level system (literal and spiritual), some multi-leveled into three (corresponding to body, soul, spirit), some four (literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical).
For example, the fourfold system would see four levels of meaning for the city of Jerusalem: 1) Literal: the actual Israelite city, 2) allegorical: the Church of Christ, 3)moral: the soul of a person and 4) anagogical: the heavenly city of God. By the 4th Century this interpretative approach was popular among the many writers of the church, and allegorical interpretation, as this approach is now known, became the normal way of approaching the OT. It remained popular until the Reformation, when Calvin/Luther (primarily) led the the Church away form the allegorical approach.
The Reformers still occasionally used allegorical interpretation, in general though they returned the church to the literary context of the Bible for the determination of meaning. Contemporary Evangelical scholarship has since followed in the Reformed's steps, and has cautioned the Church against using fanciful allegorical interpretations that are often based more on imagination than on the text itself. However, allegorical was still used by some popular preachers in the 20th Century, and is still around in various forms, and more predominately in some groups.
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