Final Thoughts
We’ve been talking a lot in these sessions about foreshadowing in the Old Testament and at times I’ve even used the technical term “type.” The idea of a “type” really comes from Romans 5:14 where St. Paul says “Adam was a type of the one to come.” A “type” in Biblical and theological language, is a person, place or thing that is a kind of advanced image or a foreshadowing of something greater that is later. This happens throughout salvation history. In fact, all of the mediators, Adam, Noah, Moses, in various ways, are types or pre-images of Jesus Christ. When we get to the Gospels, we can see Jesus being portrayed at various times as a New Adam or as a New Moses, a figure, a new David figure. We’ll explore more of that in a later session.
It’s not just Jesus who is, we say, “typified” in the Old Testament, but also other aspects of the new covenant economy, or the new covenant arrangement are also typified. The Blessed Mother is typified in Mary. The Eucharist is typified in the manna in the wilderness and by the Passover given under Moses. The Apostles are typified by the 12 officers that David’s son Solomon establishes over the kingdom of Israel in 1 Kings 4.
There are types of many aspects, most of the aspects of the new covenant system found in the Old Testament, these are foreshadowings. This is because as the Church Fathers said, “God writes history the way men write books.” A good novelist kind of subtly plants images and hints and foreshadowings of what’s going to happen in his narrative as he moves along. A master of this is the movie-maker M. Night Shyamalan. He’s made a number of famous movies, my favorite is the movie Signs.
If you’ve ever seen that movie, you know that the exciting conclusion and the elements that go into the final defeat of the aliens in the last scene of that movie is built up to all through the movie with various kinds of foreshadowing, and odd and unusual things that you observe and you think “where’s that going?” and then when the movie reaches its climax you say, “Oh, this is why they needed all those elements in order to defeat the aliens.”
God is the supreme movie-maker and the Bible is like that. There’s a forecasting in advance, images of what’s going to happen at the climax as we move through the Old Testament story. We call that “typology.”