the Jubilee has meaning that continues to be both literal and spiritual. He calls these same categories “lower” and “higher.” Interestingly, he focuses attention on the continuing importance of the lower or literal level of the Jubilee’s meaning. Jesus’s application of the Isaiah text to himself indicates spiritual liberation from sin but also and equally important, a widening declaration of freedom for those in captivity. When Jesus “applied the prediction to himself he declared plainly enough that Jubilee had a typical import but that only gave it a much more important meaning without changing in any respect its literal significance.”140 For Caruthers, the Jubilee typologically foreshadows “spiritual” freedom for those who are captive to the power of sin, but not to the exclusion of its continuing literal meaning. Ongoing fulfillment requires an ongoing experience of liberty.
To support his argument, Caruthers recalls the predictions that “the blind should see, that the deaf should speak and that the lame should walk” in the Messianic era, and that “during the personal ministry of Christ on earth, all the predictions . . . received both a literal and spiritual accomplishment.” The higher or spiritual sense continues to be fulfilled “every day and everywhere throughout Christendom, in the case of all who are brought out of the darkness of nature into the marvelous light of the gospel” but also “in the lower sense they are receiving a partial accomplishment by the skill of physicians and other friends of humanity.” For now, “by various contrivances the lame, the halt, the maimed are enabled to walk, the deaf, the dumb, and the blind are taught to read the Bible and to transact the usual business of life but,” Caruthers insists, “they are yet to receive a more literal and full accomplishment by higher attainments in medical skill and by the discovery of means which are yet unknown.”141 In the same manner, the literal implications of the Isaiah passage have already been fulfilled to a “very gratifying extent” but it “will yet have a universal fulfillment in its fullest extent of meaning.”142 A measure of contemporary corroboration of Caruthers’s view is found in Michael Green’s comment “that Jesus’s mission is directed to the poor—defined not merely in subjective, spiritual, or personal, economic terms, but in the holistic sense of those who are for any of a number of socio-religious reasons relegated to positions outside the boundaries of God’s people.”143 Caruthers is certain that the Jubilee declaration implies not only spiritual liberty but also real freedom:
Jesus Christ came to preach liberty to the captive and the opening of the prison to them that are bound and he will deliver his people who are so unjustly and so cruelly held in bondage here, either by the power of his grace on the hearts of their owners or by such judgments as will make them learn righteousness.144
In Caruthers’s thinking the distinct but related concerns for spiritual and physical well-being are viewed under the image of the Jubilee. Isaiah 61:1–2 is traditionally understood as a typological use of the Jubilee. The ancient institution of Jubilee is prophetically pulled from the Torah to describe the greater realities of God’s forgiveness of Israel and their imminent release from exile and restoration to Zion. The Year of Jubilee image is used to hold together the importance of Israel’s forgiveness by God alongside the nation’s political freedom to return and restore their land, two distinct but related concerns. Sharon Ringe has noted that “human needs often experienced as competing for attention are brought together onto the single agenda of the Jubilee.”145 Luke’s use of Isaiah’s text characterizes yet another, even greater era of forgiveness and release to be accomplished by the Messiah. Caruthers’s approach understands and upholds these distinctions without diminishing the importance of either.
Conversely, for the nineteenth-century contemporaries of Caruthers and many current commentators, the distinctive social reforms of the original Jubilee are diminished and transcended by the greater spiritual realities they prefigure. J. C. Ryle’s commentary on Luke states that Messiah’s “victories were not to be over worldly enemies, but over sin” and that he is “the Friend of the poor in spirit, the Physician of the diseased heart, the Deliverer of the soul in bondage.”146 More recent commentators express the meaning in terms of spirituality, such as “deliverance to those who were captives in the power of sin and spiritual wretchedness” or giving back “to the spiritually blind the power of sight” or “freedom from guilt and the effects of sin.”147 Darrel Bock emphasizes “release from sin and spiritual captivity” and the “spiritual overtones” of exilic identity. The Old Testament “viewed the exile as the result of sin.”148 For I. Howard Marshall Jesus’s announcement in Luke is an allusion is to the Old Testament Jubilee “appointed by Yaweh . . . and now made symbolic of his own saving acts in order to show his salvation.”149 Joseph Fitzmyer’s conclusion is similar: “The Isaian description of a period of favor and deliverance for Zion is now used to proclaim the period of Jesus, and the new mode of salvation that is to come in him.”150 An emphasis on the spiritual fulfillment of Jubilee and a muting of its social reforms in Protestant literature goes back to the earliest views of Martin Luther and John Calvin.151
Caruthers’s appreciation of the Jubilee’s distinctions and their literal fulfillment mirrors another and more influential nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister. The highly regarded Patrick Fairbairn, a theologian in the Free Church of Scotland, exemplifies the Reformed perspective in The Typology of Scripture. At nearly a thousand pages in two volumes, Fairbairn’s magnum opus remains a standard text on the topic of typology for evangelicals since its publication in 1845. He is considered by some to be “the spokesman for the Reformation tradition” on typology.152 In line with traditional typology Fairbairn speaks of the “littleness” of historical types, “exhibiting on a comparatively small scale what was afterwards to realize itself on a large on” or of “historical personages and events being related to some higher ideal, in which truths and relations exhibited in them were again to meet, and obtain a more perfect development.”153
For Fairbairn, as for Caruthers, the concrete social realities of the Jubilee continue to have application as its antitype escalates, and his understanding of the Jubilee’s application is very similar to his unknown colleague. The Jubilee addresses sin and effects, not simply as an individual issue that “still causes innumerable troubles and sorrows” but also as political and societal. “Even in the best governed states,” he writes, “the true order of absolute righteousness and peace is to be found only in scattered fragments or occasional examples.” The purpose of the Jubilee should be seen “as one of deliverance—deliverance from trouble, grievance, and oppression” so that the “the aspect of society might reflect” the “well-ordered condition of the heavenly world.” Fairbairn envisions specific social imperatives arising from the event of redemption. As he describes it: “When all in a manner, being set right between them and God, it became them to see that every thing was also set right between one person and another.”154
The sequence of reconciliation noted above by Fairbairn, from God to others, requires continuation of the Jubilee’s fuller meaning. He observes that the year of Jubilee’s emphasis on the restoration of property and freedom from captivity is united to the restoration of the people’s relationship to God. It commences not at the beginning of the year, but follows immediately after the Day of Atonement (Lev 25:9) in which reconciliation with God is dramatically symbolized in the prescribed rituals, the same rituals that foreshadow the Messiah’s death for the sins of the people.155 Isaiah’s incorporation of the Jubilee follows the same pattern. Its declaration in Isaiah 61 follows after the “Redeemer” comes and ends the separation of the people from their God (59:16—60:1). Forgiveness and reconciliation precede their release from Babylonian captivity, the end of their oppression, and the restoration of Zion. The typological understanding of the Jubilee involves certain social imperatives or events that result from its redemptive antecedent and without which severely diminished its meaning.
A few current studies corroborate the perspective of Caruthers and Fairbairn. Speaking of what Jesus actually did in his ministry, Paul Hertig observes that “Luke will not allow us to interpret this jubilee language as flowery metaphors or spiritual allegories . . . Jesus literally fulfilled the Jubilee that he proclaimed.”156 Samuel Aborgunrin complains that within traditional theology “the problem of the poor and justice, receive very
