Typological Exegesis According to the Early Church

Essentially it was a technique for bringing out the correspondence between the two Testaments, and took as its guiding principle the idea that the events and personages of the Old were ‘types’ of, i.e. prefigured and anticipated, the events and personages of the New. The typologist took history seriously; it was the scene of the progressive unfolding of God’s consistent redemptive purpose. Hence he assumed that, from the creation to judgment, the same unwavering plan could be discerned in the sacred story, the earlier stages being shadows or, to vary the metaphor, rough preliminary stages being shadows or, to vary the metaphor, rough preliminary sketches of the later. Christ and His Church were the climax; and since in all His dealings with mankind God was leading up to the Christian revelation it was reasonable to discover pointers to it in the great experiences of His chosen people. This conception, it should be observed, was no invention of Christian theologians. In the Old Testament itself the events of Israel’s past are construed as figures or types of realities to come; Deutero-Isaiah in particular looked back to the redemption from Egypt as recapitulating, as it were, God’s original victory over chaos, and looked forward to a second Exodus from captivity in the future and a renewal of creation. But a corollary of it was that typology, unlike allegory, had no temptation to undervalue, much less dispense with, the literal sense of Scripture. It was precisely because the events there delineated had really happened on the plane of history that they could be interpreted by the eye of faith as trustworthy pointers to God’s future dealings with men. 
- J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (Peabody, MA: Prince Press), 71.