Christ as the Completed Vision of Biblical Typology
Genesis begins with God creating a binary world.10 The account in Genesis 1–2 comprehends God and man, heaven and earth, man and woman, good and evil, life and death, the beginning and the end.11 Later in the Genesis record a final binary will be introduced, namely, Jew and Gentile (Gen 17).12 We can display the horizons of the binary world God created in the beginning in this manner:
It is fundamental to the Christology of the New Testament that all binaries find their unity in Christ, whose plenitude (plērōma) fills all things (Eph 1:23).13 The apostolic understanding of Christ as Creator-Redeemer is fundamental to any approach to biblical typology, for Christ’s fullness comprehends all of history, both natural and redemptive. The plērōma doctrine explains the apostolic understanding of the plenitude of Christ, who fills every dimension of creation because all things were made by Him and for Him. In Paul, perhaps most explicitly, all the cosmic binaries converge in the cross of Christ. It is in Christ that all things in the natural realm hold together (Col 1:17), for the Father has been pleased to cause the fullness (plērōma) of all things to dwell in Him (Col 1:19) in whom is found our redemption (Col 1:14).
The pleromatic unity centered in the cross of Christ is the great theme of Paul in Ephesians.
For example, Paul’s urgent prayer is for the church to understand the riches of the glory of Christ’s inheritance in the saints. As he expounds this glory, he speaks of Christ raised again from the dead, which brings together in a meaningful way both death and life (Eph 1:20). He states that Christ has been exalted to heaven, from thence to rule over the earth (Eph 1:20–22; 4:4–10), both in this age and the age to come (Eph 1:21). By this we see that the cross unifies not only life and death, but also heaven and earth and the beginning and the end. Moreover, the cross makes Christ, like Adam, the head of the church, His bride (Eph 1:22; cf. 5:23).14 Thus by a great mystery Christ makes His people to become His bride, unifying man and woman (Eph 1:23). He teaches His people to overcome the darkness with light (Eph 5:8), following the example of His sacrifice (Eph 5:1–2), which makes men to walk in the image of God (Eph 5:1). Thus Christ has comprehended good and evil and God and man. Finally, it is in the cross that Christ abolished the ancient enmity between Jew and Gentile, making one new man by bringing the peace of Christian unity (Eph 1:11–18; 2:14–22).
A similar pleromatic unity is centered upon the cross of Christ in Colossians. Paul tells us again that Christ has delivered His people from darkness to light (Col 1:12–13), giving pardon for sins, or good for evil (Col 1:14). He tells us that Christ’s manhood is the image of the Godhead (Col 1:15). Heaven and earth were created for Him (Col 1:16), and He is the beginning and the end (Col 1:17). Christ is the head of the church, who unifies man and woman (Col 1:18), whose resurrection reconciles death and life (Col 1:18; 2:13), and whose cross ties all things to Himself, things in heaven and things on earth (Col 1:20), whether Jew or Gentile (Col 1:27). We can thus display the pleromatic unity of all things in this manner:
We should now consider how the apostles show Christ as the unifier of the cosmic binaries identified from Genesis. Christ’s relationship to each of the several binaries will be examined in turn, beginning with Christ unifying God and man. Taking our cue from the Emmaus Road narrative of Luke 24:13–32, we will consider the pattern of the human suffering and the divine glory of Jesus found in the accounts of Adam, Moses, Joshua, David, Jonah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. These representational patterns show that Christ Jesus is presented in the New Testament as the antitype of each of the Old Testament characters. But the New Testament reading of the Old Testament narratives further demonstrates that Jesus corresponds in His person and work to the Lord God of that original narrative as well.15 While many other types could have been presented, the following examples seem sufficient to demonstrate that the Chalcedonian divines correctly understood the apostles, who presented Christ as both fully God and fully man.
This comes from Theological Poetics: Typology, Symbol and Christ