How hard can it be to read and understand personal correspondence?

3. Symbols that are unexplained in the context or in the OT (e.g., the “white stone” of Rev. 2:17; the “pillar” in Rev. 3:12), for which we are dependent of local customs or the immediate contextual usage.’

The Alleged Double Sense of Prophecy

• The Alleged Double Sense of Prophecy

• One of the most frequently made assertions about prophecy is that there is what some call a “double sense” of prophecy.

• Usually what is meant by this term is that a prophetic passage has two different senses, each separate from the other in the contexts of both Testaments.

• This term does not include those types of prophecies where the earlier fulfillments contain the germ or the seeds of the ultimate fulfillment (i.e., the inaugurated eschatology described above with its “already” but “not-yet” type of realization pattern).

The Alleged Double Sense of Prophecy

• The Alleged Double Sense of Prophecy

• Support for such a concept of a double sense comes from the fact that NT writers seem to exhibit unusual latitude in the way that they employ certain passages from the OT.

• If the NT writers were able to use these older texts in a way that appears to be somewhat, or even entirely, different from their original purpose, then this must be a divine indication that there is a double sense and meaning, at least to texts dealing with prophecies and types.

• This argument, however, fails to note that some of these NT passages are merely using the familiar language of the OT.

The Alleged Double Sense of Prophecy

• The Alleged Double Sense of Prophecy

• Other arguments have failed to understand fairly what the point of agreement was between the OT and NT.

• Others have urged that some prophetic passages should be given a double sense because the same prophecies refer to different events, the one near and the other remote, or the one temporal and the other spiritual, or even eternal, in its referent.

• But that is where the confusion enters.

The Alleged Double Sense of Prophecy

• The Alleged Double Sense of Prophecy

• These examples are not properly instances of double sense, for a prophecy may indeed relate to more than one thing (e.g., to both temporal and spiritual things) but still have only one sense.

• This is true for the prophecy of inaugurated eschatology.

• Weighty objections can be raised, however, against the idea of a true double sense of prophecy.

• For example, if Scripture can have different meanings, only one of which can be detected directly from the passage in either Testament, then we cannot be certain what the text really meant to teach.

The Alleged Double Sense of Prophecy

• The Alleged Double Sense of Prophecy

• Again, this theory of double senses destroys the value of prophecies, for it either complicates their meaning, so as to leave in doubt what the proper fulfillment is, or it avoids this peril by making the prophecies so general that they are incapable of any specific fulfillment.

• Another objection arises when it is said that the second and different sense is derived from the new meaning that was first seen in the NT for this OT text.

• But that possibility dissolves the force of any apologetic value that claims that the OT anticipated what happened in the New.

The Alleged Double Sense of Prophecy

• The Alleged Double Sense of Prophecy

• The solution to these matters can be found mainly in two affirmations:

• (1) A distinctive characteristic of prophecy is that it often looks forward “not simply to a single event or person, but to a series in the same line of progressive development, having . . . always the same sense, but with a manifold application”;’ and (2) in the combination of type and prophecy, what is said of the type in the Old Testament can be prophetically applied to its antitype in the New Testament.

• In these concessions, it can be seen that there is a certain amount of truth to the claim for double sense.

The Alleged Double Sense of Prophecy

• The Alleged Double Sense of Prophecy

• Many prophecies have a manifold number of applications or fulfillments as the means for ensuring that that word is kept alive while we await the climactic fulfillment, but they all share one and the same sense.

• The only point that is denied here is that prophecies can have one sense in the natural, or original, meaning of the utterance, but another that emerges later and relates to a different matter supposedly concealed in the very same words.

• Therefore, while we deny the presence of “multiple sense,” “double sense,” or the like, we affirm that there is “multiple fulfillment.”

• Misunderstanding arises when we fail to distinguish double sense from multiple fulfillment.

The Alleged Double Sense of Prophecy

• The Alleged Double Sense of Prophecy

• I prefer the label applied by Willis J. Beecher. He referred to multiple fulfillments as “generic prophecy,” which he defined as “one which regards an event as occurring in a series of parts, separated by intervals, and expresses itself in language that may apply indifferently to the nearest part, or to the remoter parts, or to the whole—in other words, a prediction which, in applying to the whole of a complex event, also applies to some of the parts.”

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