The Allegorical Method

An allegory is a symbolic representation of one thing by another.

Many of the Scriptures are allegorical in nature - certain

physical people, places, things or events of an earlier time have an ultimate
spiritual application in the present or future. For example, the Old Testament high
priest Aaron was an allegory, or symbol, of our spiritual High Priest Jesus
Christ (Hebrews 5:4-5). The Bible is its own authority for these interpretations.
God never left it up to humans to decide for themselves what His Sacred Word
means.

Over the centuries since The Bible was written, some people, for a variety
of misguided reasons, usually well-meaning and honest, but sometimes not
(see Sweet Nuthins'), have applied the "meaning" of parts of the Bible to their
own time and circumstances, far removed from what is truly found in God's
Word. Some today even see the ultimate fulfillment of Biblical Scriptures taking
place, not coincidentally, where they themselves just happen to be. They deny
what the Bible plainly says, and hijack the Sacred Scriptures for their own self-
serving purposes - using them as a means of glorifying themselves, rather than
The Creator, by Whom, and for Whose purposes, they were written.

While allegorical interpretation does have correct and legitimate usage, its
self-centered approach is actually more ancient than Christianity, having
originated with the pagan mystics, and then adopted by some Jewish and
Christian "thinkers."

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition:

"Allegorical interpretation is a hermeneutical (interpretive) method used to

uncover hidden or symbolic meanings of a Biblical text. Rooted in the techniques
developed by Greek thinkers who attempted to overcome the problems posed by
literal interpretations of ancient Greek myths, the allegorical method was further
developed by Jewish scholars, such as Philo of Alexandria in the 1st century AD,
and Christian thinkers, such as Clement and Origen of Alexandria in the 2nd and
3rd centuries AD. Though other methods were often used, the allegorical method
was dominant until late medieval times. The Protestant Reformation of the 16th
century rejected, for the most part, the allegorical method and returned to the
more literal interpretation of the Bible."
"The allegorical method attempts to overcome the difficulties of morally
perplexing Biblical passages and to harmonize them with certain traditions and
accepted teachings of the synagogue or church. By assigning to each feature of a
text a hidden, symbolic, or mystical meaning beyond the primary meaning that
the words convey in their literal sense, the allegorical interpretation seeks to
make the text more comprehensible, acceptable, and relevant to the present."

Already in the early church there were men who turned away from this
simple, natural meaning of the text and adopted what is known as the allegorical
method of interpretation. This method was learned from the heathen
philosophers, who said that one ought not to believe anything unworthy of God
and used allegory to explain away what they found offensive in the poems of
Homer and the heathen myths. This method was adopted by the Jewish scholar
Philo who used it to explain away everything in the Old Testament that he
considered to be unworthy of God or uncomplimentary to the great heroes of
Faith.

The Christian church fathers in Alexandria, in Egypt, adopted this

allegorizing method of the Platonic philosophers and Philo. This method makes
the Bible an unclear book. According to Origen, the trees in the garden of Eden
were really angels, and according to the Epistle of Barnabas, the 318 armed
servants of Abraham really symbolized the crucified Christ. Those who adopt this
method are limited in their understanding of Scripture only by the fertility of their
imagination, and it is clear that if the Bible means angels when it speaks of trees,
and if it is foretelling the crucifixion of Christ when it says that Abraham had 318
servants, then the ordinary reader can never know what the Bible is really saying.

Dalit perspective

More than one-sixth of India’s population, some 160 million people, live a
precarious existence, shunned by much of society because of their rank as
untouchables or Dalits - literally meaning "broken" people - at the bottom of India’s
caste system. Dalits are discriminated against, denied access to land, forced to work
in degrading conditions, and routinely abused at the hands of the police and of
higher caste groups that enjoy the state’s protection. In what has been called "hidden
apartheid" entire villages in many Indian states remain completely segregated by
caste.

The simple fact that 70-80% of the Christian population in India is from the
Dalit community goes to show that the missionary movement started from the
west in the modern period and the ministry of the churches in this country largely
centred on this group. let us see some of the natures how this missionaries carried
out their work amongst the dalits to present the gospel.

• Nature of the early mission to the Dalits

Two broad features characterized the early mission to the dalits

throughout India. In the first place it provided them a new self-
understanding of themselves and of the society around them with a new set
of faith concepts, religious symbols and practices which contrasted with
their traditional self-image as some sort of inferior human beings.
Secondly there was an element of social empowerment as many
missionaries stood by the untouchables in resisting their traditional
oppressors and asserting their civil rights. The response of the dalits to this
form of mission was tremendous and overwhelming the establishment of
the churches attracted lot of people, it was part of a modernizing social
process. It provided opportunity for English education, a more rational
approach to life and problems as members of the church, and a path to
social upward mobility.

• The Nature of Mission to the Dalits today

Today the church can enhance its mission to the dalits in co-
operating with them in their struggle for liberation from the upper class
religious clutches by participating in the Religious Empowerment struggles
and try to contextualize the gospel to help them understand the liberating
act of God. The incarnation aspect of Christ can open the way for
contextualization. This can take us to the centre of what God did in Christ;
reverently we can speak of the humanization of the son of God, the coming
of God into the living context of people, himself as a ‘person’. The very
mind of Christ Jesus motivates and illuminates what we are expected to do
in mission. He emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.
Evangelization of the worlds’ people is no longer a burden borne only by
the west but as we move into the next century, it will increasingly be the
new churches of the Third world that will be taking a strong initiative.
[15]
Regardless of what the particular ethnic group be it the dalits, the
imperialistic missionary style no longer fit’s today’s mission. There is
much of great value in the culture that receives the missionary, these
values actually becomes the conducts for transmission of the good news of
 Jesus Christ. Contextualization focuses on categories of truths, that can be
“read” from the culture and which correspond to the Biblical revelation.

For any critical and constructive engagement of Dalit freedom with the
biblical resources we need to take note of the following important methodological
observations that will enhance the process of our interpretation.

First: The issue of common ground between Biblical world and Dalit world is of
paramount importance for any heuristic exploration of either of these areas and to
see their integral interconnection. The struggles of Dalits can easily find certain
natural affinity towards the struggles and experiences of the marginalized
communities of the Bible written down as the faith expressions in their various
traditions.6 In other words, there are certain points of convergence in the matrices of
both the Biblical and Dalit world. The Biblical matrix of preferential option towards
the alienated and marginalized and the Dalit matrix of their struggle for
egalitarianism are placed on the same plane.7

Second: The liberative hermeneutics is the common ground and concern in our
quest to see inter-relatedness between Biblical and Dalit worlds. The important
objective in the liberative praxis for Dalits is their liberation from the socio-cultural
oppression. The Dalit liberative praxis oriented hermeneutics is geared towards the
liberation of Dalits from the psychological, cultural and social oppression and to
empower them to get organized in their struggle for freedom.8 The biblical narratives
with liberation potential are already processed and reprocessed accounts addressed
in their original settings and they continue to negotiate and renegotiate in our
context to make the liberation potential possible. It is this understanding that should
precolate the context of the oppressed communities of Dalits in India as they search
for human experience of God in and through their socio-cultural milieu.9

Third: In the light of the above two criteria set out for the common ground of
interpretation for both Dalit liberation and Biblical foundation for that purpose,
certain new textual stirrings have been noted in the Indian interpretation of the
Bible. By disentangling the biblical texts from the clutches of oppressive caste and
hierarchical elements and to look out for more crucible points of liberation
hermeneutics, several biblical scholars and theologians have already been engaged
in a serious process of dialogue between Bible and Dalits. In this process both
synchronic and diachronic methods of biblical interpretation is adopted.10 The other
major concerns surfacing in this process are: the orality and literacy of the text, God
as an active agent of poor and marginalized and the vulnerability of God alongside
the sovereignty. These issues will naturally let us move into our ground reality of
considering the issue of Dalit hermeneutics.

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The Feminist Approach

The feminist biblical hermeneutic had its origin in the United States toward
the end of the 19th century. In the socio-cultural context of the struggle for the rights
of women, the editorial board of a committee charged with the revision of the Bible
produced "The Woman's Bible" in two volumes (New York 1885, 1898).

This movement took on fresh life in the 1970s and has since undergone an
enormous development in connection with the movement for the liberation of
women, especially in North America. To be precise, several forms of feminist
biblical hermeneutics have to be distinguished, for the approaches taken are very
diverse. All unite around a common theme, woman, and a common goal: the
liberation of women and the acquisition on their part of rights equal to those enjoyed
by men.

We can here mention three principal forms of feminist biblical hermeneutics:

o the radical form,

o the neo-orthodox form
o the critical form.

The "radical" form denies all authority to the Bible, maintaining that it has
been produced by men simply with a view to confirming man's age-old domination
of woman (androcentrism).

The "neo-orthodox" form accepts the Bible as prophetic and as potentially of

service, at least to the extent that it takes sides on behalf of the oppressed and thus
also of women, this orientation is adopted as a "canon within the canon," so as to
highlight whatever in the Bible favors the liberation of women and the acquisition of
their rights.
 The "critical" form, employing a subtle methodology, seeks to rediscover the
status and role of women disciples within the life of Jesus and in the Pauline
churches. At this period, it maintains, a certain equality prevailed. But this equality
has for the most part been concealed in the writings of the New Testament,
something which came to be more and more the case as a tendency toward
patriarchy and androcentrism became increasingly dominant.

Feminist hermeneutic has not developed a new methodology. It employs the

current methods of exegesis, especially the historical-critical method. But it does
add two criteria of investigation.

• The first is the feminist criterion, borrowed from the women's liberation
movement, in line with the more general direction of liberation theology. This
criterion involves a hermeneutic of suspicion: Since history was normally
written by the victors, establishing the full truth requires that one does not
simply trust texts as they stand but look for signs which may reveal
something quite different.
• The second criterion is sociological; it is based on the study of societies in the
biblical times, their social stratification and the position they accorded to
women.

With respect to the New Testament documents, the goal of study, in a word is not
the idea of woman as expressed in the New Testament but the historical
reconstruction of two different situations of woman in the first century: that which
was the norm in Jewish and Greco-Roman society and that which represented the
innovation that took shape in the public life of Jesus and in the Pauline churches,
where the disciples of Jesus formed "a community of equals." Galatians 3:28 is a
text often cited in defense of this view. The aim is to rediscover for today the
forgotten history of the role of women in the earliest stages of the church.

Feminist exegesis has brought many benefits. Women have played a more active
part in exegetical research. They have succeeded, often better than men, in detecting
the presence, the significance and the role of women in the Bible, in Christian
origins and in the church. The worldview of today, because of its greater attention to
the dignity of women and to their role in society and in the church, ensures that new
questions are put to the biblical text, which in turn occasions new discoveries.
Feminine sensitivity helps to unmask and correct certain commonly accepted
interpretations which were tendentious and sought to justify the male domination of
women.

With regard to the Old Testament, several studies have striven to come to a better
understanding of the image of God. The God of the Bible is not a projection of a
patriarchal mentality. He is Father, but also the God of tenderness and maternal love.

Feminist exegesis, to the extent that it proceeds from a preconceived judgment,

runs the risk of interpreting the biblical texts in a tendentious and thus debatable
manner. To establish its positions it must often, for want of something better, have
recourse to arguments <ex silentio.> As is well known, this type of argument is
generally viewed with much reserve: It can never suffice to establish a conclusion
on a solid basis. On the other hand, the attempt made on the basis of fleeting
indications in the texts to reconstitute a historical situation which these same texts
are considered to have been designed to hide—this does not correspond at all to the
work of exegesis properly so called. It entails rejecting the content of the inspired
texts in preference for a hypothetical construction, quite different in nature.

Feminist exegesis often raises questions of power within the church, questions
which, as is obvious, are matters of discussion and even of confrontation. In this
area, feminist exegesis can be useful to the church only to the degree that it does not
fall into the very traps it denounces and that it does not lose sight of the evangelical
teaching concerning power as service, a teaching addressed by Jesus to all disciples,
men and women