“It is a dangerous way to approach the Bible, to look for a few isolated proof texts in the New Testament while disregarding the Old Testament.”

– Scott Hahn

After my year-long hiatus, I’m finally back and ready to continue my series on the Blessed Virgin Mary.

But first, I’m going to briefly explain the biblical concept of Typology. I’ve mentioned typology before, but I wanted to cover it in a bit more detail because it will play a key role in my upcoming posts on Mary, as well as other posts that I have planned for the future.

So, what exactly is typology?

Typology is about recognizing how certain Old Testament figures were foreshadowing certain New Testament figures.

To quote the Catholic Encyclopedia, a type is “a person, a thing, or an action, having its own independent and absolute existence, but at the same time intended by God to prefigure a future person, thing, or action.”

Here’s what the Catechism of the Catholic Church has to say about typology:

The Church, as early as apostolic times, and then constantly in her Tradition, has illuminated the unity of the divine plan in the two Testaments through typology, which discerns in God’s works of the Old Covenant prefigurations of what he accomplished in the fullness of time in the person of his incarnate Son.

Christians therefore read the Old Testament in the light of Christ crucified and risen. Such typological reading discloses the inexhaustible content of the Old Testament; but it must not make us forget that the Old Testament retains its own intrinsic value as Revelation reaffirmed by our Lord himself. Besides, the New Testament has to be read in the light of the Old. Early Christian catechesis made constant use of the Old Testament. As an old saying put it, the New Testament lies hidden in the Old, and the Old Testament is unveiled in the New.

— CCC 128-129

So, in summary, what’s written in the Old Testament indeed has its own original meaning and significance, but it also has even further, deeper meaning and significance when read in light of the New Testament. We can see now, after the events of the New Testament, that so much of what occurred surrounding the life of Christ was foreshadowed and prefigured in the Old Testament. To be clear though, we’re not talking about Messianic prophecies, those are of a different category than the types we’re discussing here. Prophecy is an explicit prediction of things to come, while typology is a more subtle foreshadowing of things to come.

Also, this typology idea wasn’t a later development of Christianity, it actually originates in Scripture itself. For example, in Romans 5:14, Saint Paul says that Adam was “a type [Greek: τύπος (typos)] of the one who was to come [Jesus Christ]”. Similarly, 1 Peter 3:21 calls baptism an antitype of Noah’s Ark. English translations will often say that Noah’s Ark “prefigured” or “corresponds to” baptism, but the original Greek word is ἀντίτυπον (antitypon). As you can see based on the context, “type” refers to the Old Testament figure, and “antitype” refers to the New Testament figure which corresponds to the type.

So, we learned typology directly from the Apostles. And there are many other typological connections in Scripture which are not explicitly pointed out by the sacred authors, but which are implicit in what they wrote and how they wrote it. The Old Testament contains types that foreshadow Christ in many different ways, as well as types that foreshadow Mary and her unique role in salvation history, the Sacraments of the Church, and even the papacy. That’s just to name a few. These types have been discovered by the Church, using the same Apostolic method of reading Scripture which Saints Peter and Paul demonstrated for us. Typology was employed heavily by the early Church Fathers when they read Scripture, and the Church has kept this tradition alive throughout her entire history.

I have a fondness for typology because of how strongly it impacted me upon my return to the Church nearly five years ago. Learning about these connections between the Old Testament and the New Testament, seeing these incredibly intricate ways in which Old Testament figures are fulfilled in New Testament figures, it really blew my mind — specifically in regards to Mary as the new Ark of the Covenant, the new Eve, and the new Queen Mother (all of which I’ll discuss at length in my series on Mary), as well as the Last Supper/Christ’s Passion as the new Passover sacrifice, and several others.

Studying these typological figures and how they connect to each other really strengthens the evidence for the Divine inspiration of the Bible, because you come to realize that there’s no way that mere human beings could have had the knowledge, the wisdom, and the foresight to fabricate all of these connections and details. And because of this, studying typology has great potential to strengthen one’s faith.

Furthermore, typology helps us to make sense of some uniquely Catholic beliefs, and can therefore be a very useful apologetic tool. The famous convert and apologist Scott Hahn, for example, is very passionate about typology, in part because it contributed to his own conversion to Catholicism; and the same is true for many other converts.

I hope that my explanation of typology has been helpful, but I’m sure it will be even more helpful if we take a more detailed look at a specific instance of typology in Scripture, which is exactly what I plan to do in my next post, on the typology of Mary as the Ark of the New Covenant. So keep an eye out for it.

God love you.