The models of historical explanation offered by Hayden White (Metahistory, Baltimore, 1973) are Formist, Organicist, Mechanistic, and Contextualist; but none of them, so far as I can see, will work with the text [the New Testament] here considered. One would need to add a fifth, called, perhaps, Hermeneutic […]. Modern instances of it might be hard to find outside the historico-prophetic works of pyramidologists, Seventh Day Adventists or other fundamentalist and apocalyptic sects, of which, however, there are nowadays a great number.
– The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (1980), p. 157