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The Importance Of Typology In Christianity

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Christianity has been from the beginning a typological religion. “Typology in Christian theology and Biblical exegesis is a doctrine or theory concerning the relationship between the Old and New Testaments”. (Merriam-Webster 868) Perhaps the single most important concept for understanding early Christianity is typology. Typology is a form of study of literature identifying symbols especially in the Bible. This system of groupings, usually called types, the members of which are identified by postulating specified attributes that are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive groupings set up to aid demonstration or inquiry by establishing a limited relationship among phenomena. Typology is interpreted throughout text in American literature such as William Bradford’s Plymouth Plantation, Jonathan Edward’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and Thomas Paine Common Sense. During the Enlightenment, the meaning of Protestant identity became increasingly vague; typology took on the hazy significance of image and symbol; what passed for the divine plan had lost its strict grounding sculpture; providence itself was shaken loose from its religious frame work to became part of the belief in the human progress. The eighteenth-century clergy took advantage of this movement to shift the focus of figural authority, from Bible history to the American experience. In effect, they substituted a regional for a biblical past, sanctified the American present as a movement from promise to

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