allegory where art thou?

From Robert Louis Wilken in First Things...

Allegory fell on hard times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the charm of beloved works of English literature such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress lies in the imaginative use of allegory, biblical scholars banished the term from their vocabulary. Harper’s Bible Dictionary, for example, published in the 1980s by leading scholars of the Society of Biblical Literature, does not even have an entry under the word.

The neglect of allegory in modern times is not surprising. With the emergence of historical criticism as the dominant form of biblical interpretation, allegory was discredited as a feckless style of medieval exegesis that twisted the words and phrases of Scripture into arbitrary symbols of hidden truths. As one biblical scholar put it: “Where allegory and its variations come into play, the meaning of the text is murdered.”

In truth, the abandonment of allegory was a revolt against the Church’s tradition, including the tradition that is found in the New Testament itself. The practice of allegorizing the Old Testament—giving certain passages a meaning other than the plain sense—was not an invention of the Church Fathers or the Middle Ages; it was the work of the authors of the books of the New Testament. And in their exegesis of the Old Testament, patristic commentators consciously imitated what they had learned from the New Testament....

Wilken then refers to a classic example in I Corinthians 10 before setting the table for his broader point:

Paul had written that the Israelites in the desert “drank from the supernatural Rock which followed them, and the Rock was Christ,” to which he added that these things were “written down for us as types.”...

Accordingly, Origen believed that Paul, by his example, had provided a “rule of interpretation” for understanding the Old Testament. “Take note,” he writes, “how much Paul’s teaching differs from the plain meaning. . . . What the Jews thought was a crossing of the sea, Paul calls baptism; what they supposed was a cloud, Paul says is the Holy Spirit.” And what Exodus calls a “rock,” Paul says was “Christ.” Christian interpreters, says Origen, “should apply this rule in a similar way to other passages.”...

Following St. Paul, the Church Fathers argued that a surface reading of the Old Testament, what Origen calls the “plain” meaning, missed what was most important in the Bible: Jesus Christ....

To drive home the point, the Church Fathers also cited the passage in Ephesians where St. Paul interprets the famous words about the institution of marriage in Genesis as referring to Christ and the Church. The text in Genesis reads: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”...

Why does it matter?

The customary term for this kind of exegesis is allegory, a word first introduced into Christian speech by St. Paul in the Epistle to the Galatians: “It is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave and one by a free woman. But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, the son of the free woman through promise. Now this is an allegory; these women are two covenants.” The root meaning of allegory is that there is another sense, another meaning, besides the plain sense. Sarah and Hagar are not simply names of the wives of Abraham; they also signify two covenants, one associated with Sinai and the other with the Jerusalem above....

Allegory is not distinctive to Christian exegesis of the Old Testament. It was used by Greek literary scholars in the ancient world to interpret the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, and it was employed by Jewish thinkers—for example, Philo of Alexandria—to interpret the Pentateuch.
Christian allegory has similarities to this kind of allegory, but what sets it apart is that it is centered on Christ. Allegory in Christian usage means interpreting the Old Testament as a book about Christ....

For most of the Church’s history (the early Church, the Church during medieval times, and the Reformation era), the Old Testament was read in this way—as a book about Christ and the Church. As the historical study of the Bible gained ascendancy in the twentieth century, however, the Old Testament came to be understood chiefly within the framework of ancient Near Eastern history, culture, and literature....

Such books as Leviticus and Song of Songs, however, cry out for spiritual interpretation if they are to be read profitably by Christians. Leviticus, taken only in its literal sense, is more of an obstacle to faith than a means of exhortation or edification, as Origen once observed. It is ­surely significant that Leviticus and the Song of Songs are seldom read in Christian worship today. Without alle­gory, a spiritual interpretation related to Christ, they ­languish....

The task of an interpreter is to help the faithful look beyond the surface, to highlight a word here, an image there, to find Christ unexpectedly, to drink at the bountiful spring whose water is ever fresh. Though early Christian exegesis may on first reading appear idiosyncratic and arbitrary, it arose within the life of the Church and was practiced within a tradition of shared beliefs and practices, guided by the Church’s faith as expressed in the creed. Exegesis was not about novelty but about finding the triune God in new and surprising places within the Scriptures.