The allegorical method is the approach to interpreting Scripture that seeks hidden, deeper, or spiritual meanings beneath the literal sense of the text, treating the words as symbols pointing to truths other than what the author plainly says. It flourished in the early church through the Alexandrian school, especially Origen, who under the influence of Greek philosophy distinguished multiple senses in Scripture and often treated the literal meaning as a husk concealing a higher spiritual kernel. In the medieval church this developed into the quadriga, the fourfold sense: the literal (what happened), the allegorical (what to believe), the tropological or moral (what to do), and the anagogical (what to hope). The method is not wholly without warrant—Scripture itself contains genuine allegory, type, and figure, and Paul once draws an allegory from Hagar and Sarah—but as a controlling method it proved disastrous, for it detached interpretation from the author’s intent and made the text a wax nose to be shaped at the interpreter’s will. The Reformers, while honoring true typology and the Christ-centered reading of the Old Testament, decisively rejected unbridled allegory in favor of the single intended sense recovered by grammatical-historical study. Luther scorned the allegories as “empty speculations,” and Calvin warned that Scripture must not be tortured into senses its authors never meant. The distinction to be preserved is between the legitimate recognition of the typology Scripture itself signals, and the imposition of arbitrary spiritual meanings the text does not warrant.