Reading Scripture (Part 1)

Everyone reads Scripture after a tradition. Sometimes, that tradition is frightfully novel and idiosyncratic, even egotistical. Most of the time, however, when a person reads Scripture, they are reading it after the manner of someone who came before them, who initiated them into that tradition. The person who teaches us to read traditions us in a way of reading. The parents, pastors, teachers, mentors, and friends among whom we have read the Scriptures are all influences that have contributed to our reading tradition. Moreover, God Himself traditions us into the Scriptures. The Father causes all Holy Scripture to be written for our learning. The Son who is the Word of God is communicated to us through the words of the inspired Scriptures, and they in their many times and many places bear witness to Him. The Spirit indwells our minds and illuminates them so that in His light we may see light, and in His straight paths we may not stumble. Reading Scripture is never just a matter of me and my Bible.

Anglican Catholics read the Scriptures in conversation with the catholic tradition of the Christian West. The place of the Scriptures in our faith and practice, as well as our sensibilities for interpreting the words of Scripture, precede the Reformation and situate us in continuity with the English Church of prior centuries, and indeed the earliest days of the Church. In order to perceive this, however, it will help us to take a tour through the development of the Church’s habits of Scriptural interpretation as well as the rules of reading, generally called hermeneutics. Given the unique character of the Scriptures, our approach to reading and discerning meaning begins with as rigorous an approach as we would give to any text, and yet obliges us to far surpass it. Fortunately, we stand on the shoulders of giants. We are the beneficiaries of millennia of reading, marking, and learning the Scriptures. As we seek to engage the Scriptures more fully in our time, we do well to consider our reading tradition. In the next three posts, then, we will discuss the development of our approach to reading the Scriptures as Anglican Catholics.

The New Testament

Sacred Scripture bears witness to the early tendencies of Christian interpretation in the apostolic writings of Ss. Peter and Paul. Both apostles establish, from the beginning, the Christian hermeneutics of reading all the Scriptures as revealing Christ. As St. Peter preached on Pentecost, the Hebrew Scriptures anticipate the work of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection. St. Luke tells us that Christ Himself unfolded how they do so in a remarkable, though unrecorded sermon given to the disciples en route to Emmaus. St. Stephen the deacon argued so compellingly from the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ that the rejection of Christ immediately passed to him and he was stoned to death. St. Paul’s writings, in the most granular style of all the apostles, unfolds not only how the Scriptures point to the work of Christ but also illuminate the life and work of the Church. The apostolic interpretation of the Scriptures are best seen in terms of anticipation and remembrance. All things gather in expectation to reveal Christ, and all things are now stamped with Christ so as to reveal what He has done, is doing, and will finally do. In St. John’s writings, especially in Revelation, we see how the Scriptures exist in a unity among the many authors and eras that composed them—that there is a golden thread connecting the beginning to the end, and that thread is Christ.

The Church Fathers

The immediate successors of the Apostles were broadly known as the Apostolic Fathers. In their writings, we see a nuanced reading of the Scriptures that engages them in literal, figurative, moral, and eschatological (having to do with the end of the age and the coming of Christ). At the center of these senses, and holding them together, was the Person of Christ Himself, in whom humanity and divinity, the creation and the Creator are in union. Clement of Rome (d. 99), who succeeded Peter and Paul and lived alongside St. John, stressed the unitive principle of what he called the ‘rule of faith’ to pull together a variety of reading and worshipping traditions that were already emerging within the first century of the Church’s life. Ignatius of Antioch, (d.117) cements the continuity of this ‘rule of faith’ in the office of the Bishop, whose ministry is to protect the orthodoxy of the Church and faithfully impart the authority and teaching of the Apostles. And, in the apocalyptic text The Shepherd of Hermas, we see an explosive application of the moral and figurative senses of Scripture in a poetic exhortation to a holy life.

Irenaeus of Lyons (b.130) opened the 2nd Century by re-emphasizing fidelity to the ‘rule of faith’ after Clement of Rome, insisting that the Scriptures—which had only recently been completed by his birth and had started to coalesce into a corpus of writings—were to be read through the lens of the tradition of the apostles to give definition to interpretation. The prevalence of gnostic readings of Scripture—by which mystical meanings were thought to be accessible through numinous secret rules of reading—were leading many astray. To combat this, Irenaeus asserted an early compilation of apostolic doctrines to fence in/off those eccentric interpretations. The Scriptures were to be read as inspired for the Church founded on Christ and upon the rocks of His apostles. Soon thereafter, Justin Martyr (100-165) explored the relationship of words with the eternal Word of God, and how divine meanings could be communicated through sensible signs like writing and speaking.

Hippolytus (170-236) is the earliest biblical writer of the third century. He used Christological interpretation, stressed the value of the OT for Christians, respected accordance with apostolic tradition, and produced many exegetical writings. He followed Justin and Irenaeus in focusing on Christological interpretation. His contemporary, Tertullian (160-225), wrote largely as an apologist for the faith, though he also wrote against faltering Christians he considered not rigorous enough in their faith. He used the Bible to condemn what he regarded as corruptions of the faith, constructing doctrine out of Biblical exposition. He then defended the doctrines of Christ’s Resurrection, the necessity of grace, and the unity of God, all from the Bible.

Origen (185-254) formulated perhaps the first system of interpretation. He suggested that there was a “triple sense” of Scripture: the literal, the moral, and the spiritual. Origen grounded his work in an appreciation of symbolism, a theology of the incarnation, which he saw as making symbols capable of bearing ultimate meaning, and, consequently, a “sacramentalized” view of the world. At the heart of his work, Origen questioned what constitutes the Bible and how it was to be understood. He produced the Hexapla, an exhaustive six-column comparison of Biblical texts in original languages and their translated versions. The first column contained the Hebrew of the Old Testament (which was not widely known), while the other five columns contained different versions of the Septuagint (the Greek translations of the Hebrew OT). He believed that the Scriptures were inspired by the Holy Spirit, working in human authors, and the importance of the teaching tradition of the Apostles and their successors. He argued that every word of Scripture has a profound meaning. From his work emerged what came to be known as “The Alexandrian School,” which specialized in symbolic readings of the Scriptures.

Alexandrians and Antiochenes

Among the Alexandrians, we encounter St. Athanasius (296-373), whose use of Scripture primarily served his apologetic and theological meditations. He stressed that individual verses should be used with an eye to the whole of Scripture, as though each part of the Scripture was a window into every other part of the Scriptures. Ultimately, passages are to be interpreted by the rule of faith, the coalescing creeds of the Church’s essential beliefs. For Athanasius, Christians were to search the Scriptures to be ready for the coming of Christ as judge. He tends to draw out the literal meaning of the Gospels more than Origen, seeing the Scriptures as shaping us in real time for a definite end, although he considers the Old Testament as primarily about Christ. Following him, Didymus the Blind (313-397) was also known for Biblical interpretation in the interpretive tradition of Origen. He defended the Council of Nicaea and was a leader in the ascetical movements of the 4th Century. Didymus was concerned that the reader of Scripture should advance to spiritual maturity and understanding to perceive their whole meaning. His interpretation took place on both the literal and spiritual levels, advancing from one to the other. Finally, St. Cyril of Alexandria (378-444) was known primarily for his orthodox view of Christ. He was also trained in the Alexandrian tradition of exegesis. His conflict with the Antiochene School (which we will discuss next) was not confined to methods of interpretation; he opposed the Antiochene, Nestorius, on his views about Christ. Nestorius had trained under the Antiochene exegete Theodore of Mopsuestia. By contrast, Cyril based his exegesis on Origen, and their differences of interpretive methods emerge in their theological debate.

In creative dialogue with the Alexandrians was the more literalist “Antiochene School” of interpretation, which centered around the Christian hub of Antioch, where disciples were first called “Christians.” There, Diodore of Tarsus (330-90) was the founder of the Antiochene School, who preferred the literal and historical sense over the allegorical and spiritual sense. Despite caricatures coming, at times, from the Alexandrians, the Antiochenes were not given to a wooden literalism but rather insisted that Biblical texts and authors are conditioned by their situations or settings in life. Theodore of Mopsuestia (350-428) studied under Diodore and was a friend to St. John Chrysostom. He is often associated with the arch-heretic Nestorius, but Theodore’s view of Christ did not diverge from orthodoxy with the same intensity. His first exegetical principle held that since Scripture is inspired by God, it can never mean anything unworthy of God or useless to man. Likewise, St. John Chrysostom (347-407) opposed allegorical interpretation and condemned the teachings of Origen, specifically. He depended wholly on the Septuagint as the Church’s Old Testament, and his commentaries on the Biblical books are very sober and succinct. By contrast, his homilies ranged more widely in his exhortations to his congregation about the application of Scripture to Christian life, but he never strayed far from the text.

The influence of the dialogue between these two schools cannot be overstated and remains with us today. While the Antiochenes looked especially to authors of texts, Alexandrians looked to a greater degree to their pastoral effect on readers. Embodying the influence of both was the great Bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose (338-97), who was a pastoral and teaching bishop whose hermeneutics focused on the use of Scripture for the purpose of instruction and formation. St. Jerome (340-420) bridged the 4th and 5th Centuries, and was an impressive translator and textual critic. He was heavily influenced by the Alexandrians, and especially Origen. But he was also familiar with the Antiochenes: Diodore, Theodore, and John Chrysostom. Jerome is one of the few at the time to know Biblical Hebrew and Jewish methods of interpretation. He worked hard to establish the text in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and provided a Latin translation (the Vulgate) from his reading of Hebrew and Greek. And on the basis of His work, a voluminous and creative tree of reading traditions evolved as the Church entered the Middle Ages.

Needless to say, this is not an exhaustive history, but I do believe it is indicative of the primary trends that characterized the development of Scripture reading in the West. Whenever we begin to become conscious of a tradition, we inevitably realize that the many voices outside the densest part of that traditional consensus are also very important and worthy of consideration. Even so, we have to start somewhere; it does us well to create a frame into which other voices can be interwoven. In part two of this series, we will take a look at the Medieval and Early Modern Period, out of which the unique school of Anglican interpretation emerged. In part three, we will discuss the distinctive traits of the Anglican Catholic manner of reading Scripture, to the end of offering a helpful rubric for the typical reader of Scripture so that they might dive more deeply and experience the richness of Scripture more completely.