Principle 4: Symbol and type, the rules that keep Revelation from becoming a mirror

From Sovereign Grace and the Scope of Election: A Comparative Examination of Attainment Theology and Grace Theology, with Particular Attention to the Question of Whether God's Elect Are Found Among All Nations and Religions

The principle. Apocalyptic and typological texts are read by four controls. (1) The book's own announced idiom: Revelation opens by saying the message was "signified", sign-ified, communicated in signs (Revelation 1:1), so symbolism is not an evasion but the stated genre. (2) Scripture interprets its own symbols: Revelation's images are drawn from the Old Testament (Zion, Babylon, temple, tribes, Balaam, Jezebel), and their meaning is fixed by their canonical usage, not by the reader's environment; where Revelation defines a symbol itself, candlesticks are churches (1:20), the harlot is the great city (17:18), the fine linen is the righteousness of saints (19:8), that definition is final. (3) Numbers in apocalyptic are schematic: seven for completeness, twelve for the covenant people, a thousand for vast fullness, hence 144,000 (twelve squared, times a thousand) reads, by the book's own arithmetic, as the complete covenant people sealed to the last man, which is exactly how the chapter functions: the sealed multitude heard (7:4) becomes the innumerable multitude seen (7:9), the same company from two vantage points, as with the Lion heard and the Lamb seen in 5:5-6. (4) No doctrine from symbol alone: a symbolic passage may illustrate and confirm doctrine established in didactic Scripture; it may never originate a doctrine that the didactic Scriptures contradict.

Why it should be preferred. Because the only alternative on offer is selective literalism, and selective literalism has a consistent history: the interpreter's own group regularly turns out to be the subject. The attainment system reads the 144,000's celibacy literally but their maleness, Jewish tribal registration, and sinlessness figuratively, four adjectives in one description, sorted into literal and symbolic piles by no stated rule except the needs of the conclusion. The four controls above, by contrast, can be applied by anyone, yield the same result regardless of who applies them, and were not designed for this dispute, they are the ordinary grammar of the genre. A hermeneutic you would accept from your opponent's hands is a method; a hermeneutic that only works in your own hands is an apologetic.