Hans Frei on Typology or Figural reading

Hans Frei has done most in recent decades to rehabilitate figurative or typological reading as a necessary component of Biblical hermeneutics. Building on the work of literary scholar Eric Auerbach, Frei argued that the Bible points to its own unity and inner coherence by inviting figural interpretation. In Auerbach’s terms:

Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or person in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while second involves or fulfills the first. The two poles of a figure are separated in time, but both, being real events or persons, are within temporality. The are both contained in the flowing stream which is historical life, and only the comprehension, the intellectus spiritualis, of their interdependence is a spiritual act.[1]

In other words: typology shows that two events or characters are part of the one connected stream of history in way that is not necessarily obvious from mere analysis of causality. The prefiguring of one by the other is discerned by (or, perhaps better, revealed to) the reader. In theologian Frei’s words:

In figural interpretation the figure itself is real in its own place, time, and right and without any detraction from that reality it prefigures the reality that will fulfill it. This figural relation not only brings into coherent relation events in bibical narration, but allows also the fitting of each present occurrence and experience into a real, narrative framework or world. Each person, each occurrence is a figure of that providential narrative in which it is also an ingredient.[2]

Unlike allegorical reading, typological interpretation points to the embeddedness of the events in a common narrative framework governed by providence.[3] These are ‘real’ or ‘historical’ at least in the sense that they gain their meaning from a relation to divine providence – the same providential narrative in which the reader of the text then in turn finds herself.[4]

This observation dovetails with Nicholas Lash’s proposal for a ‘performative’ reading of Scripture. There is a sort of double typology at work: the reader of Scripture is invited to see not only types of the Messiah in the OT narratives, but also then to model his own life (and death) after the pattern of the life of Christ. The structure of shadow and fulfilment is not repeated in the life of the believer (the believer’s life is not the reality prefigured in some way by Christ); but the typological similarity serves to bind the disciple into the same reality as the world of the text, within the frame of the same providential narrative. The text may serve not only as a type of Christ but also, in a secondary way, as a type of the follower of Christ.

[1] Erich Auerbach, Mimesis : The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 73.
[2] Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative : A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 153.
[3] The great Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye, for his part, wrote: ‘Typology points to future events that are often thought of as transcending time, so that they contain a vertical lift as well as a horizontal move forward.’ Is ‘transcending’ the right verb? Typology as it is used in the NT, and as observed by Hans Frei, reconfigures time certainly, but doesn’t overcome or dispense with it (if that is what is meant by ‘transcending’ here). Northrop Frye, The Great Code - the Bible in Literature (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul Ltd, 1982), p. 82.
[4] This is what Frei argued had been ‘eclipsed’ in all the debates about what it was the texts refered to.