Contemporary Literary Works Research Articles

Typology and the Literary Christ-Figure: A Critique

T HE aim of this article is to examine the term Christ-figure, which has assumed so important and yet somehow so questionable a role in contemporary literary criticism. To understand the meaning of this term I think that we must turn, as too few literary critics have, to the of the Gospels. For clearly Christ-figure is intended to suggest a certain correspondence between the characters in some contemporary fiction and the character of the New Testament Christ. I wish to elucidate the kind of correspondence that would be appropriate from the theological point of view and then indicate why this conception of correspondence is also the one that allows for genuine artistic creation. In the Bible itself we may find a fruitful clue for literary criticism. I refer to the way in which one biblical person or pattern of events may typify another. To follow this clue may, indeed, clarify what I sense to be a present confusion in critical methodology. We must begin by paying attention to the suggestion implicit in the very term, Christ-figure. As I hope to show, there is an appropriateness to this phrase that the seemingly similar one, Christ-myth, lacks. For the word figure suggests that the pattern associated with Christ and in some way echoed in contemporary literary works is not a timeless, archetypal one but belongs to a particular historical life, the historicity of which is not to be ignored but is essential to the intended correspondence. My contention is that literary critics may have something to learn from those biblical scholars who have returned to typological criticism as a way of discerning and interpreting the relatedness of different parts of the Old Testament and also the relationship of the Old Testament to the New Testament. I want to outline how these biblical