Figures of the Whole Christ

In his unjustly neglected work on Medieval Institutions and the Old Testament (1965), Johan Chydenius notes the fateful shift in the logic of interpretation during the course of the middle ages: “According to the typological outlook, not only the mystery of Christ taken by itself but also the sacramental order of the Church by which it was extended to the faithful could be regarded as the antitype of the prefigurative order of the Old Covenant. The Christian institutions could, then, be looked upon in two different ways. On the one hand, as part of the fulfillment in Christ, they were antitypes of the OT institutions. On the other hand, as belonging to a sacramental order distinct from Christ, they were symbols of him. As such, they were analogous to the OT institutions . . . . [A]s soon as this analogy became a commonly accepted fact, the Christological basis was partly forgotten. It was simply assumed that every Christian institution had its counterpart in the OT, and that this was true irrespective of whether it was a symbol of Christ or not. The analogy between Israel and the Christian society thus emancipated itself from typology and sacramental symbolism alike, and became a principle of interpretation in its own right.”

To my mind, a great deal depends on a recovery of the original typological vision in which the Bible is read as a figuration of the whole Christ, head and body, Lord and His community formed by Word and Sacrament.