t which the lesson would cease to be enforced" but adds that Augustine, does not want to make too much of insignificant details. However, Barry follows Augustine's much-quoted exegesis of the Good Samaritan parable as a proxy for what would become the moral authority of the Church.
Hostility to the allegorical method, long associated with Catholic orthodoxy, is articulated by (Protestant) Dungan, who says that it "treats the word of God as if it had only been intended to be a kind of combination of metaphors--a splendid riddle . . . not obtain[ing] the meaning of the text, but thrust[ing] something into it" (Dungan 60).
Clement of Alexandria maintained that the law of Moses had a fourfold significance--natural, mystical, moral and prophetical. Origen held that the Scriptures had a threefold meaning, answering to the body, soul and spirit of man; hence that the meanings were physical, moral, and spiritual (Dungan 61).
This statement by Dungan was made in 1888. In the 20th Century, allegory as an exegetical strategy was rehabilitated by Tillich, who deplored "literalist distortion" of Scripture and called for a symbolic understanding of Jesus' career and the Redemption: "Christianity, in principle, can never accept one of its actualized [literal] forms as the final form. And whenever it does so, it deviates from the fundamental understanding of the cross" (Tillich 76).
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