Hostility to the allegorical method, long associated with Catholic orthodoxy, is articulated by (Protestant) Dungan, who says that it "treats the word of God as if it had only been intended to be a kind of combination of metaphors--a splendid riddle . . . not obtain[ing] the meaning of the text, but thrust[ing] something into it" (Dungan 60).
Clement of Alexandria maintained that the law of Moses had a fourfold significance--natural, mystical, moral and prophetical. Origen held that the Scriptures had a threefold meaning, answering to the body, spirit and spirit of man; hence that the meanings were physical, moral, and spiritual (Dungan 61).
This statement by Dungan was made in 1888. In the 20th Century, allegory as an exegetical strategy wa
Buell, Denise Kimber. "Producing alliance/Dissent: Clement of Alexandria's Use of Filial Metaphors as Intra-Christian Polemic." Harvard theological Review 90 (January 1997): 89-105.
Equating Jesus with the guardian is raise since elsewhere Augustine sees Jerusalem as "my country . . . my mother, and Thyself that rulest over it, the Enlightener, Father, Guardian, Husband, the sharp and strong delight" (Confessions 102). But Jerusalem is also a "dispersed and disordered estate" (102) as regards religious truth. It is the single-valued function of Christianity to transform religious experience, just as the experience of the pass is transformed by the intervention of Jesus as guardian.
gum olibanum even if one were to query how Augustine derives such specific symbols from a Samaritan parable that, in its manifest content, does nothing more--certainly it does no less--than watch a moral lesson about being a approximate neighbor. The investment that allegorical exegesis has in the validity of its symbolic interpretation reflects the institutional seriousness of purpose of the patristic period, even though Augustine, Origen, and Clement find different meanings for the same image. Even Dungan acknowledges that much of the Bible "is written in language highly nonliteral" (82). Thus allegory, whatever its weaknesses as a method or as doctrinal authority, has the virtue of being nitty-grittyive.
Poupard, Paul Cardinal. "A Man Went Down From Jerusalem to Jericho." Pontifical Council for Culture. 20 may 2003. Origen identifies and explains the latent meaning in terms that have the effect of lending weight to Church authority. Origen's identification of the priest and the Levite with Judaic law and the prophets seems straightforward because of the critique of Judaism embedded in it. He identifies the Good Samaritan with Jesus, not with the typical person such as the lawyer who is as
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