Types

Continuing on Hahn's Hail, Holy Queen: The Mother of God in the Word of God

As in any good book, sometimes setting up the background, the scenery, the basics about all the characters can be a little slow. I feel that this is what this part of Hail Holy Queen is like. But this information is very important in understanding what is going to come after it, so please hang in there!

From page 23:

The first Chrisitans followed their Master in reading the Bible this way. In the letter to the Hebrews (8:5), the Old Testament tabernacle and its rituals are described as "types of shadows of heavenly realities" and the law as a "shadow of the good things to come" (10:1). Saint Peter in turn noted that Noah and his family "were saved through water," and that "this prefigured baptism which saves you now." (1Peter 3:20-21). Peter's word translated as "prefigured" is actually the Greek word or "typify" or"Make a type." The apostle Paul, for his part, described Adam as a "type " of Jesus Christ (Rom 5:14).

So what is a type? A type is a real person, place thing or event in the Old Testament that foreshadows, something greater in the New Testament. From "type" we get the word "typology," the study of Christ's foreshadowing in the Old Testament (CCC 128-130)

Again we must emphasize that types are not fictional symbols. They are literally true historical details. When Saint Paul interpreted the story of Abraham's sons as "an allegory" (Gal 4:24), for example, he was not suggesting that the story never really happened; he is affirming history whose meaning was clear only after is eventual fulfillment.

And now he starts to get into the good stuff!

Marian types abound in the Old Testament. We find Mary prefigured in Eve, the mother of all the living; in Sarah, the wife of Abraham, who conceived her child miraculously; in the queen mother of Israel's monarch, who interceded with the king on behalf of the people of the land; and in many other places in many other ways (for example Hannah and Esther). The type addressed most explicitly in the New Testament, the ark of the covenant, I will discuss in greater detail in its own chapter. Here I will merely point out that as the ancient ark was made to bear the old covenant, so the Virgin Mary was created to bear the new covenant

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