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Originally Posted by ZNPaaneah
Yes, this is something else I find poorly defined or expressed. I would agree that Allegories role is not to add meaning but to extract it from the rest of the Bible. I disagree that this is "parasitic. Instead I would say that a good allegory, or a good parable can convey a lot of truth in a very brief way. For example, you could ask a bunch of rabbi's to define "who my neighbor is" or you could ask a bunch of lawyers or scribes to do this. I doubt any of them could come up with a more elegant, concise and helpful definition as the Lord did in His parable of the Good Samaritan.
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I think that the tendency to be looking for allegory rather than looking at the narrative and eventually realizing that there is an allegory involved is where it gets parasitic. If we come to scripture holding to a few pet themes for which we scour scripture trying to find any faint resemblance to the pattern so we can declare an allegory or metaphor in play, then we are being parasitic. We may point to other scripture in the process. But if there is really nothing in the source scripture to link to the secondary scripture, then the forcing of an allegory or metaphor on it to make that link to the secondary scripture is parasitic relative to the first scripture. It takes from what is in that scripture and gives it to another. It deflects and ignores the meaning of the first scripture.
This was one of Lee's greatest sources of error. He did not seem to have much care for the primary narrative in so many parts of the OT. If he could find any way to layer on "Christ and the church," "the ground of the church," "God's economy," or whatever, that was all it was about. Conclusions from his reading of the NT we used to reformulate OT passages into allegories of the NT for the purpose of underpinning the importance of his NT position. For example, he pushes the ground of the church, using the presumed metaphor of Jerusalem as being the church and the synagogues being Christianity. But you don't automatically arrive at the conclusion that there was something errant in synagogues unless you start with the presumption that it is somehow an anomaly based on an overlay of "the right place" that ends with a doctrine of church ground.
My complaint is not that we should not sometimes take opportunities to teach more than is in a particular passage. It is in the insistence that the thing added is because of some special link hidden between the lines, or in the shadows of its metaphorical meaning when there is no such meaning. Better to admit no link but say you are going somewhere else anyway. It at least gives the reader/listener an opportunity to assess the secondary statements on their own rather than trying to make the two fit together as if written to be so. This is Lee's error. And his falsehood.
It is true that a good parable or good allegory can provide a lot of truth. But that does not suggest that there are a lot of parables or allegories in the whole of scripture. Surely there are some. But so many of the ones that Lee found just weren't there. He went searching for patterns to force into an allegory to support a position. That is parasitic. It takes from scripture and the only thing it gives back is the waste product it pushes out the back end. Synagogues go in, and out the back comes a declaration that scripture abhors them like Lee abhors Christianity. But scripture never abhorred synagogues. That is the excrement of a false allegory. It took away from scripture and gave nothing scriptural in return.