How to Read Scripture

The ancients did not read scripture as Protestants might today. Of course, one can read these texts in any way - as a fairytale, as poetry, as documents of historical happenings. But scripture is something specific, it is a text that is inspired and with which we can commune with God. You can’t do that with a history book! That doesn’t deny the historical aspects at all, it just means these historical events carry a spiritual meaning, that God can communicate to us through that story, factual or not.

The great Jewish Biblical scholar James Kugel reminds us that ancients read scripture according to 4 principles. First, a text that is Holy Scripture must have its meaning revealed. The “plain meaning’ must be spiritually integrated. It must be “opened” as Christ opened the scriptures to the Apostles on the road to Emmaus.

Second, Scripture’s purpose is not to inform us about events in the past, but about the present: ‘these things happened to them as a type, but they were written down for our instruction upon whom the end of the ages has come’ (1 Cor. 10:11). That means the story about Jonah is about, among other things, what’s happening right now. It speaks to us here and now. Perhaps the Whale is a particular sin that is coming for you because you are running from it, for example.

Third, that Scripture is harmonious, nothing contradicts anything else in the Bible.

Fourth, if it meets all three of the previous criteria, then it is truly scripture, and that means it is inspired by the Holy Spirit, who in Christ speaks to us directly in the Scriptures.

So, how did ancient Christians read what we now call the Old Testament? Well, through the cross. They starts at the end, with Christ crucified. From there they works out there theology, through the cross. All the Fathers did. That is the “eschatological” reading. Eschatology is the end, it is the revealing. On the cross, Jesus is revealed as God. This is what the Fathers call the “spiritual meaning” of scripture as opposed to the fleshly meaning.

For example, Christ on the cross to fleshly eyes would appear as just a man. But at His crucifixion, His true divine nature is revealed, and we finally see not just a man, but God Himself.

As Fr John Behr says, before his conversion Paul was very familiar with the Scriptures. He read them carefully. What did he surmise they were telling him to do? Well, to kill Christians!

Yes, without the revelation of Christ the old testament can tell us very little about anything. The Apostles knew the Scriptures, but could not recognize Christ as God until after His passion on the cross.

So, what does this mean? It means everything in the Old Testament must refer to Christ. It must point to Him. That is where every interpretation must end. The meaning must be Christ crucified.

It’s actually the same with all communication, and Christ is the Word. You don’t know what a sentence means until you’ve heard it to the end.

For example, if I begin a sentence, “The plant….”, and ask you what the word “plant” refers to, perhaps you’ll say leafy green vegetation.

I continue my sentence, “The plant was very busy today……”. Well, now you’ll probably say the word “plant” actually refers to a factory.

Now I finish my sentence, “The plant was very busy today secretly infiltrating the enemy's camp.” Ah ! The word “plant” referred to a spy.

Notice, you didn’t know until the end what the word “plant” meant. Only once you got to the end, could you then make sense of the word at the beginning, retroactively giving it meaning.

In the same way, you cannot know what the story of Moses in Egypt means until you get to the end of the story. Moses in Egypt is like the beginning of my sentence, equivalent to the word “plant”. What is the end of the “sentence” or story? Christ crucified! Yes, the story of Moses refers to Christ crucified.

We must begin knowing that whatever we read must refer to Christ on the Cross. Hence, the Israelites could not know the real meaning because only at the end do we retroactively confer meaning on the story. The meaning comes at the end.

So, the Fathers will say Moses is a type of Christ, and he goes into Egypt which represents death, and through the red sea which represents baptism, and is “resurrected” when he is led to the promised land which refers to heaven. The story really refers to Christ crucified and risen!

Now, even before I opened my mouth to tell you about the plant, I had the meaning already in my mind. The meaning was at the beginning for me, but you couldn’t know that. For you, the meaning only came at the end, in time.

Just so, the meaning, Christ crucified, is the end of the story in time but was the beginning in the sense that the story occurred for its sake. Hence Origen will say Christ’s passion is both the beginning and the end - of everything, of the Cosmos itself.

Hence, Origen will say without the cross the Old Testament is only myth, even if it happened. St Gregory of Nyssa will agree :

"Therefore the Apostle said, 'the letter kills, but the spirit gives life,' since often if we were to stand in the mere concrete reality of the history, scripture would offer us no patterns at all of the good life."

- Gregory of Nyssa, Hom. in Cant., prologue

So, St Irenaeus says:


“For every prophecy, before its fulfilment, is nothing but an enigma and ambiguity to human beings; but when the time has arrived, and the prediction has come to pass, then it has an exact exposition [exegesis]. And for this reason, when . . . it is read by Christians, it is a treasure, hid in a field, but brought to light by the cross of Christ.”

One can easily imagine how the meaning of your favorite book would change entirely if given a radically different ending. The Cross changed the meaning, or revealed it, for the entire “old testament.”

Finally, for most of history very few people could read or write, the primary experiences of scripture for most of history were visual, oral, aural, and dramatic in the context of public liturgy rather than private study.

Liturgical tradition is a continuation of the practices of the early Church, the Church is not based on the Bible. Rather, the Bible is a product of the Church.

Narrative coherence and what the Bible “means” for belief has always ultimately governed tradition and its development.

For example, that Arian controversies showed that each dissident party could quote sources of theology quite evenly, and thus as a singular issue either one could have been vindicated. But it was the narrative compatibility (faith that was already practiced, sung, and understood for centuries) with dogmatic theses that resolved the matter in favour of the Nicene party.

The evaluation of whether to affirm the Nicene homoousios or the semi-Arian homoiousios is not a matter that can be settled by "formal" logic." Which of these is a good move, a good inference, is inextricably bound to the matter of the community of practice who are heirs of the apostles' teaching, who receive and read and inhabit the world of Scripture, and who pray to Jesus. 

That "first order" of prayer and proclamation is on the plane of know-how; doctrines as formulated in the Nicene Creed are the fruit of the community of Christian practice "making explicit" the norms that were previously unsaid. Doctrines say what, up to that point, we previously did, in a sense. In doing so, the community of practice is able to discern what counts as faithful practice.

Doctrines are, in very real way, derivative from practice.

Doctrine is not synonymous with religion, nor is it either the center or foundation of religion. Religion is located primarily in our doings, in the practices that constitute a community of worship and devotion to God.

The meaning of the claim “Christ is Lord”—like the meaning of any assertion—is conditioned by use: what the assertion means is relative to the context of a particular community of practice.

To confess that Jesus is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God”is to articulate what was already implicit in our prayers, a worshipful way of life nourished by the Scriptures.

So, one sung/read Scriptures communally and liturgically, not for information, but for transformation, for divination, and to commune with God.

You may read the texts anyway you like, but if read as *Scripture, they had little to do with past events, and instead were thought as God’s voice, attaining you to His point of view *in the present*.

Hence, the Bible is a sacrament, and only exists in the life of the Church, to remove the Bible from its proper environment is to deform and utterly change its meaning. Whenever the context is changed, so is the meaning. And each community has concrete practices that make such meaning *intelligible - in traditional Christianity that only through prayer, fasting, and liturgy that Scripture makes sense.

As John Behr says,

"The coherence of dogmatic reflection and scriptural exegesis, as practiced the context of a worshipping community and ascetic practices aimed at ‘putting on Christ’, is broken, however, when the ‘dogmas’ are extracted from this setting to be treated ‘systematically’, independently of scriptural exegesis, and set alongside other, primarily historically-oriented, ways of reading Scripture, resulting in a confusion about how it all holds together, with some emphasizing the absolutely historicity of everything that is written, others doing so for parts of Scripture, but neither reading Scripture as Scripture."