The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Review of Darek Barefoot's book on typology apologetics

Well, actually it’s a link to a review. A fellow Cadrist of mine has reviewed a new book from another old correspondent pal of mine, Darek Barefoot (from the days before web journals!–omg I feel so old… :wink: ), on the rigors, perils and (he would say) the rewards of applying typological correspondences between sets of scripture. Darek presents it for apologetic purposes of divine inspiration of the texts. I remain sceptical of such application, but JD (who started reading sceptical of the application, too) was pretty impressed by it, and presents a balanced evaluation of the pros and cons of the book itself. (Darek himself used to be agnostic or atheistic, and like C. S. Lewis has a lot of sympathy for where sceptics are coming from, by the way.)

What inspired me {rimshot!} :mrgreen: to post a link to the review here, was an example mentioned by JD in his review, regarding the symbolic use of Moses throwing down and taking up serpents; which could easily be worth an extended discussion in itself. Put shortly, and in context of this forum, Moses doesn’t throw down his staff in order to slay it as a serpent. He throws it down, to take it up once again as a useful staff. I hadn’t really noticed before how this could be indicative of God’s intentions toward Satan, including as representative of any sinner. (JD doesn’t mention whether Darek draws this correspondence.)

Even if the apologetic agenda via typology doesn’t pan out in the end, Darek’s book sounds detailed enough to be worth picking up as a way of learning metaphorical referential connections.