What Is Allegorical Interpretation, and Should We Use It?

Question 1038.

Allegorical interpretation treats a biblical text as a coded surface concealing a deeper, often quite different, spiritual meaning beneath it, and it has a long and influential history in the church, particularly through the Alexandrian tradition associated with Origen and later through much of medieval exegesis. The question of whether allegorical interpretation should be used at all deserves a careful answer, because the method is not simply wrong in every conceivable application, but it is far more dangerous than its long pedigree might suggest.

I want to explain what this method actually does, look honestly at the one place Scripture itself seems to use something like it, and explain why I nonetheless regard it as an interpretive method to avoid as a general practice.

What Allegorical Interpretation Actually Does

Allegorical interpretation looks past the plain, historical sense of a passage to find a hidden spiritual or moral meaning the interpreter believes lies beneath the surface. Origen, working in third century Alexandria, applied this method extensively to the Old Testament, treating historical narratives as elaborate spiritual allegories whose literal, historical content mattered far less than the timeless spiritual truths supposedly encoded within them. Under this approach, the details of a text, a name, a number, a physical object, become symbols to be decoded rather than historical particulars to be understood in their own right.

The appeal of this method is understandable. It allows a preacher to extract seemingly fresh spiritual applications from even the most mundane historical details, and it can make obscure Old Testament passages feel immediately relevant to New Testament concerns. That appeal is also precisely the source of its danger.

The One Text Often Cited in Its Defence

Defenders of allegorical interpretation regularly point to Galatians 4:24, where Paul, discussing Sarah and Hagar, writes that these things may be interpreted allegorically, using the Greek verb allegoreo. This is a fair text to raise, and it deserves honest engagement rather than being explained away. Paul does draw a symbolic parallel between Hagar and Sinai on one hand and Sarah and the Jerusalem above on the other. What Paul is doing here, though, is different in kind from the allegorical method as it later developed. He is not denying or bypassing the historical reality of Sarah, Hagar, and their sons. He explicitly builds his argument on the actual historical account in Genesis, and then draws out a typological correspondence between that history and the present situation of law and grace. This is closer to what we would today call typology, using a real historical event as a divinely intended pattern pointing forward to a later reality, than to the later allegorical method that treated historical details as largely dispensable once their supposed hidden meaning had been extracted.

Paul’s single use of allegorical language in a specific, controlled argument does not license a general interpretive method that treats every subsequent biblical narrative the same way, extracting spiritual meanings loosely connected to, or even disconnected from, the actual historical sense of the text.

Why the Method Becomes Unstable

The fundamental problem with this approach as a general method is that it removes any objective control on meaning. Once an interpreter is free to look past the plain, historical sense of a text for a hidden spiritual meaning, the interpreter’s own theological assumptions, cultural context, and imagination effectively determine what that hidden meaning turns out to be. Origen and his successors could, and did, produce wildly divergent allegorical readings of the same passages, each claiming spiritual insight, with no textual mechanism available to determine which reading, if any, was correct.

This instability is not a hypothetical risk. Church history shows allegorical interpretation being used to justify positions ranging from the mildly fanciful to the genuinely damaging, precisely because the method supplies no textual discipline capable of ruling out an interpreter’s preferred conclusion once the plain sense of the passage has been set aside as simply the outer shell. Contrast this with literal interpretation, where the meaning of a text remains anchored to what the author actually intended his original audience to understand, a standard that at least in principle can be checked against grammar, vocabulary, and historical context.

Distinguishing Allegory From Legitimate Typology and Symbolism

None of this means Scripture is free of symbol, type, or pattern. The Old Testament sacrificial system genuinely does foreshadow Christ’s atoning work, as Hebrews argues extensively and explicitly. Adam genuinely is a type of Christ, according to Romans 5:14, where Paul uses the actual Greek word typos. The difference between this kind of typology and allegorical interpretation as a general method is that typology keeps the historical reality of the earlier event firmly in view and grounds the later spiritual significance in an intended, divinely designed correspondence that Scripture itself frequently makes explicit, rather than a meaning invented by a later interpreter’s imagination and imposed upon a passage that gives no indication of intending it.

Apocalyptic symbolism in Daniel and Revelation likewise uses a recognisable symbolic vocabulary, beasts representing kingdoms, numbers carrying theological weight, that the original audience, familiar with the wider prophetic tradition, would have understood as intentional symbolism rather than plain historical description. Recognising this symbolism is simply careful literal interpretation applied to a genuinely symbolic genre. It is not the same undertaking as allegorising a straightforward historical narrative to extract a meaning the author never intended and the text does not indicate.

My Own Working Rule

My own practice is to reserve symbolic or typological readings for places where Scripture itself clearly signals that a type or symbol is intended, whether through explicit New Testament commentary, as with the sacrificial system in Hebrews, or through a genre, apocalyptic literature, that the original audience would have recognised as inherently symbolic. Outside those clearly signalled cases, I treat historical narrative as historical narrative, teaching as teaching, and I resist the temptation, real as it sometimes is in sermon preparation, to extract a clever spiritual meaning from an incidental detail the text never intended to bear that weight.

The Reformation Recovery of Plain Sense

It is worth remembering that the church did not always read Scripture the way the Reformers taught it to. Medieval interpretation frequently employed what became known as the fourfold sense of Scripture, reading each passage for a literal meaning, an allegorical meaning concerning what to believe, a moral meaning concerning how to live, and an anagogical meaning concerning future hope, often with the literal sense treated as simply the starting point for the supposedly richer senses layered above it. Luther and Calvin, among others, pushed back hard against this framework, insisting that the plain, grammatical, historical sense of the text was not one layer among several equally valid options but the governing sense that controlled and constrained everything else a text could legitimately be said to mean.

This recovery mattered enormously for the doctrines the Reformation rediscovered. Justification by faith alone, salvation by grace rather than merit, the sufficiency of Christ’s finished work, all of these emerged from a return to reading Paul’s letters according to their plain, intended sense rather than through centuries of allegorical and moralising tradition that had, in places, obscured what the text actually said. The stakes of this interpretive question, in other words, are not simply academic. Sound doctrine has historically depended on sound method, and unsound method has historically produced doctrinal error, sometimes of the most serious kind.

It is worth adding that allegorical readings are not always obviously wrong on the surface. Some of the historical allegorical interpretations produced genuinely beautiful, spiritually rich reflections that continue to be quoted approvingly today. The problem is not that allegorical interpretation always produces false or harmful conclusions. It is that the method itself provides no reliable way of distinguishing a genuinely insightful allegorical reading from a mistaken one, since both are generated by the same undisciplined process of imposing meaning rather than discovering it. A method that occasionally produces good results through no fault of its own internal safeguards is still a method worth avoiding in favour of one that reliably anchors interpretation to the author’s actual intention.

A further practical safeguard worth naming is this: whenever you hear a proposed spiritual meaning drawn from a text that seems to have little connection to what the passage actually says on its surface, ask whether the preacher or writer offering it could explain, using ordinary grammar and historical context, why that meaning is actually there rather than simply possible to imagine there. If the only support offered is that the interpretation feels spiritually edifying, that is a sign of allegorical method at work, however sincerely intended, rather than genuine exposition of what the author wrote.

So, now what?

Approach any teaching that claims to have uncovered a hidden meaning beneath the plain sense of a familiar passage with real caution. Ask whether the text itself, or a clear New Testament commentary on it, actually signals that a deeper pattern is intended, or whether the supposed hidden meaning has simply been imported by the interpreter’s imagination. Scripture is rich enough in its plain sense to sustain a lifetime of genuine study without needing to be decoded as though its surface meaning were somehow insufficient.

Now this may be interpreted allegorically: these women are two covenants.

Galatians 4:24, ESV