Prelapsarian Christological Mediation and the Typology of Adam and Eve in Jerome Zanchi’s De Operibus Dei

Abstract

This article examines the typological patterns that distinguish Jerome Zanchi’s exposition of human creation in his De Operibus Dei intra spatium sex dierum creatis (1591). It argues that Zanchi’s distinctive application of the principle that Christ is the “scope” and “substance” of scripture to the exegesis of the relevant texts in Genesis 1–2 is tied to a conviction that Christ’s mediatorial headship over the church embraces a continuity of operations between the prelapsarian and postlapsarian states. Because of this he believes that the prelapsarian type, or figurative sign, can participate in the antitype, or the spiritual reality the type signifies, without eliding the critical distinction between them, as illustrated in his articulation of the “image of God.”