Reading Scripture (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this mini-series, we discussed how our reading of Scripture always takes place within a reading tradition. We may be conscious or unconscious of that tradition, but it will influence us in either case. Anglican Catholics read the Scriptures in interaction with the tradition of the ancient Church and what became the Christian West. In the last post, we explored how the New Testament itself bears witness to a tradition of reading the Scriptures as fulfilled in the Person of Jesus Christ, through whom the Scriptures are read as either anticipation or remembrance. We noted that this tradition unfolded in the early centuries of the Church, as Christians explored how the union of divinity and humanity in Christ, and the union of Christ and Church in the Spirit, revealed how divine truth could be communicated to human minds. As we turn now to the Middle Ages and beyond, we will look at how a unique spirituality emerged in the English Catholic Church, which became, in its time, the patrimony of the Anglican Catholic expression of the Christian life and its approach to the Scriptures.

As a brief note: I want to give proper credit to Fr. Anthony Thistelton and his excellent distillation of the interpretative history of the Scriptures in the Church. Interaction with his work has given my sense of the tradition a greater sense of structure and trajectory. Embarrassingly, my citation of his work in the previous post was clipped in a round of editing, but in all three parts of this series, Fr. Thistelton’s work looms large and has been essential to my understanding. May God grant him rest with the saints in paradise.

The Middle Ages

Augustine of Hippo (354-430) bridges the gap between the classical and medieval worlds, if only in terms of his profound influence from one on the other. In his reading of Scripture, he offers sober, succinct, historical exegesis, but not without moral application. This is supported by a knowledge of the rule of faith and a strong view of sin and grace, as the reformers recognized. Academic rigor must be combined with the love of God and for our neighbor. We need education, including knowledge of history and philosophy, but also communion with God to read the Scriptures well. Gregory the Great of Rome (540-604) built on the work of Augustine and commended “four senses” of Scripture: the literal (mainly linguistic and historical), the allegorical (often a spiritual or pastoral extension of meaning), the moral (how the Scriptures exhort, correct, and train Christian living), and the anagogical (a context in world-history related to the end of all things in the Kingdom of God). The Venerable Bede (673-736) knew and emphasized patristic readings of the Scriptures. We find that fourfold sense of meaning in his nuanced, verse-by-verse commentary. He built on the work of Jerome and other patristic sources, aiming to bring the English church fully into the patristic and Latin tradition. Alcuin of York (735-804), who came after Bede, was an educator. He compiled extracts from the Church Fathers for students without direct access to patristic literature and used these in his biblical commentaries. He standardized and corrected the received biblical translations, which he presented to the emperor Charlemagne at his coronation. Bernard of Clairvaux’s (735-804) method of exposition followed Origen and the Alexandrian school of allegorical tradition, focusing particularly on the poetics that unify the Scriptures.

Hugh of St. Victor (1096-1141) renewed historical emphasis in his readings of Scripture, seeking to capture imaginatively the situation of the events in the texts. This recapturing of the imagination of Scripture proved formative for Christian living, believing that many passages were likely to indicate how things would happen in the future. Peter Lombard (1100-1161) wrote commentaries on the Psalms and the Pauline Epistles. His chief work is doctrinal, including a book on the Trinity, one on the incarnation, and one on creation and sin. He was concerned about apparent textual discrepancies and looked at each psalm as a whole. He gave a more historical and literal interpretation of Paul than any other medieval writer. Some criticized him for abandoning a more contemplative approach to the Bible in favor of a more scientific or technical approach. In his Book of Sentences, he asked questions about symbols and meaning, how tangible signs communicate intangible realities. Stephen Langton (1150-1228) related the Bible to doctrine and pastoral care, and was associated with the founding of the famous University of Paris. He taught the fourfold sense of Scripture: the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical. Bonaventure (1217-1284), in the Franciscan revival, produced a commentary on Luke. His exegetical method was most influenced by Hugh of St. Victor and Peter Lombard. His hermeneutics were deeply theological, focusing on the Trinity and the Holy Spirit. He brought together the development of doctrine and a close reading of Scripture and has been influential as a complement to Aquinas.

Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) reaffirmed the received “fourfold sense” but also paid particular attention to the linguistic and theological issues at hand, especially in how Scripture uses metaphor, stressing how those metaphors reveal God. Many still view his teachings as normative. He spoke of the Holy Spirit as the author of the Bible, but he also paid attention to its literary and linguistic diversity. He has sometimes been regarded as the first truly scientific commentator or expositor of the Bible. He hypothesized that in the Bible, we witness a union of divine purposes with human agency without losing the fullness of either. He adopted a fairly commonsense approach to the traditional fourfold sense. For Thomas, the literal sense was the foundational meaning, and the other senses could not be used to prove points of doctrine. He was interested in the historical situations of the writers and readers (as we often see in a modern commentary). Thomas also voluminously uses the Church Fathers, and especially quotes Chrysostom, whom he regarded as one of the best exegetes of the early Church.

The Early Moderns

Martin Luther (1483-1546) and John Calvin (1509-64) insisted that Scripture is not so multilayered—their concern was to promote what they called the clarity of Scripture and claimed a “single” meaning. We can observe in their writings both an attempt to distill a tradition of reading from complexities and disparities, so that a simple doctrine could unfold from the simple reading of Scripture. They tended to rely very heavily on an Antiochene tendency of privileging the literal sense, though they also read under a heavy influence of Augustine. Their contemporary in England, William Tyndale (1494-1536), stressed the historical and corporate dimensions of hermeneutics, including what we might call the capacity of Scripture to perform speech acts. At the same time, Abp. Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556) applied many of these reformation principles in the formation of the Book of Common Prayer. He stressed the cultivation of literacy such that many could read the Scriptures, and even mandated that a Bible be accessible in parish churches to permit anyone who desired it to come in and read. Like Luther and Calvin, Cranmer focused on the clarity of Scripture, and on the Augustinian notion that the piety of the Christian’s life made the Scriptures more clear, which is one reason why the reading of Scripture was situated on a daily basis within the Church’s common prayer.

As the Anglican practice unfolded after Cranmer, it was a group of theologians called the Caroline Divines who produced the first Anglican golden age of spiritual writings. As it concerns the reading of Scripture, we can see their project as being the definition of an Anglican hermeneutic among a variety of Protestant impulses of the time. Through their work, we can see the emergence of an Anglican Catholic tradition that fortified the sometimes frayed connection with the ancient Church, while also responding creatively to the skeptical crisis at the heart of the Reformation. Theirs was neither a fideism nor revolution. Among the earlier Divines was Bp. Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), who stressed the reading of Scripture as preparation for Holy Communion, noting that the preaching of the Word was ordered to bring one to the Holy Table. His contemporary was the priest-poet Fr. George Herbert (1593-1633), who had a particular sensitivity to the Scriptures as having a ‘plain sense’ but also a ‘plenary sense’ that could include the more allegorical, figurative, moral, and anagogical senses. As a poet, he recognized that the diversity of genres in the Scriptures spoke to a common truth in the delightful phrase “all thy lights combine.” The greatest, though, among the Caroline Divines was Bp. Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), who definitively reunited the Church of England’s experimentation with Protestant Biblical Interpretation back into a conversation with Catholic tradition. His breadth and depth of interaction with the church fathers was instrumental in regularizing Anglican interpretive practice. At the same time, he was not dogmatic about the tradition so much as respectful of it as an essential imaginative landscape in which the mind could apprehend the Scriptures. Theologically, he married the often-at-odds strands of the literal and figurative interpretive traditions in a distinctly English sensibility.

The Oxford Movement

If the Caroline Divines were the first golden age of Anglican Catholic sensibility, then the Oxford Movement marked the start of the second. As a response to the moral inertia of the sometimes indolent establishment Church in England, as well as to the vacuity and apostasy of what was called the ‘high critical movement’ of Biblical criticism running rampant in Germany, the Oxford Divines pursued a serious liturgical revival with an aim to restoring pious living. They also crafted a brilliant corpus of writings called the “Tracts for the Times” (hence their nickname, the Tractarians). In those tracts, the Oxford Divines called for a harmonizing of Anglican practice with the older Catholic tradition in a way that had not been possible since the time of the Reformation. We will remember Roman Catholicism was illegal in England until 1791, a mere forty years before the Oxford Movement began. The Tractarians saw an entrenched overreaction to the Catholic tradition in some parts of the Anglican Church. They sought—like the Carolines—to fortify a sense of continuity with the Church throughout history to stabilize Anglicanism in its confrontation with a rising Modernism.

The three most influential theologians of the movement were John Henry Newman, Edward Pusey, and John Keble. Newman (1801-1890) interacted with rising scrutiny concerning the limits of language to express eternal truths. His view of Scripture sought to balance the role of experience as stabilized by tradition. Various modernisms had sought to leverage new insights from the sciences against religious traditions; Newman stressed that a more robust experience of the Truth could only deepen our understanding of tradition and, with it, Scripture. His contemporary, Edward Pusey (1800-1882), reasserted in his time the allegorical or spiritual interpretation of Scripture, which he saw as providing that thread of continuity through the vicissitudes of modernity. The saving truth of the Scriptures was evergreen, regardless of what was happening in the world. Along with Newman and Pusey, John Keble (1792-1866) was a deep reader of the recurring motifs and symbols of Scripture, which he saw as having a formative influence on the organization of the Church. His work was influential in the advancement of liturgy as the milieu for reading Scripture so as to discern its meaning. The work of the people in the Liturgy became a lens through which Scripture became legible for the faithful, which in turn aided with the formation of the Christian.

Modern Anglican Resourcement

The Oxford Movement came to an end before its work was completed. Martin Thornton notes this in his work Pastoral Theology: A Reorientation, in which he saw the allegorical and symbolic revival—expressed primarily in liturgical renewal—as falling somewhat short of a formational renewal among Anglican Catholic churches. One wonders if this is not perhaps a byproduct of Newman’s abdication of the movement when he transferred to Roman Catholicism, taking with him his keen insight into the role of experience. Regardless, the Anglican Catholic sensibility picked up again in the 20th Century. Standing out from among them were the modern Anglican Catholic divines Francis Hall, Evelyn Underhill, John Macquarrie, Eric Mascall, and Martin Thornton.

Hall (1857-1932) produced an immense collection of Anglican Catholic dogmatic theology, formally articulating the AC position on numerous theological questions (after the manner of Thomas Aquinas), as distinct from the Protestant and Roman Catholic perspectives. While not directly a work on hermeneutics, his theological reasoning reveals a habit of deep engagement with Scripture that is not challenged by deep engagement with Tradition. Balancing this dogmatic approach, Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) conducted an exhaustive study on the mystical tradition of the Church, including its mystical reading of Scripture. She was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the Anglican Catholic response to modernizing and liberalizing threads of Christian thinking. In her wake, John Macquarrie (1919-2007) added to this work by addressing the emergent Existentialist movement in Europe, asserting a traditional Christian epistemology (or a philosophy of how we know things) against a creeping despair that knowledge was even possible. Macquarrie revived a method of thinking about Scripture from the Caroline Divines that posited the symbiosis between Scripture, Tradition, and Reason.

Like Hall, Eric Mascall (1905-1933) drew deeply from the work of Thomas Aquinas to articulate how our ability to comprehend the things of God always required the use of analogy, expressing confidence in the things of Nature to communicate divine truths. He set in a relationship with Christ both the Church and the Christian to show how the continuity of life between them was mutually revelatory, one of the other. His reading of Scripture focused on the typological reading centered on Christ, and how this holds together the Christian understanding of the Faith. Finally, Martin Thornton (1915-1986) identified the notion of the “speculative-affective synthesis” that synthesized the insights of this 20th Century movement, so as to articulate a vision of Christian formation in the Anglican Catholic way, cementing its continuity with the catholic tradition of the West, while being deeply faithful to the daily reading of Scripture as a source of continual refreshment as a practitioner of (and not merely a thinker within) that tradition. To date, Thornton’s work remains the standard of how one may balance the old with the new, the theoretical with the practical in the Christian life.

As we draw this part of the series to a close, we can observe how much a faithful Christian life is a dialogue between ourselves and those who have gone ahead of us. It reminds us that we do not make ourselves, neither in our creation, redemption, nor perfection. As Anglican Catholics, we stand on a small but substantial branch of Christianity, in a common life with our Lord, with His Apostles, and with His Church in every age. As we turn into the third and final part of this series next week, we will address what it looks like for Anglican Catholics to read the Scriptures with all of these things in mind, so that we may increase the knowledge and love of God with those who have walked the path before us.