Protestant Poetic Sophistication

“The reformers loudly denounced the profusion of allegories and the doctrine of the four senses . . . But the Reformers accepted, and indeed exalted, typological symbolism, endeavoring by more and more rigorous means to distinguish this divinely sanctioned symbolic method from arbitrary allegorizing . . . the new Protestant emphasis is clear: it makes for a different sense of the Bible as a unified poetic text, and for a much closer fusion of sign and thing signified, type and antitype. The characteristic Protestant approach takes the Bible not as a multi-level allegory, but as a complex literary work whose full literal meaning is revealed only by careful attention to its poetic texture and to its pervasive symbolic mode — typology” (Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, p. 117).