Reading Scripture (Part 3)

Anglican Catholics are defined by a prayerful encounter with the Scriptures in conscious dialogue with the Church and her saints. To read the Scriptures as an Anglican Catholic means to be fully and robustly Anglican—to grow into the maturity of the Church’s threefold Rule of Mass, Office, and Personal Devotion—and to be fully and robustly Catholic—anchored to the Faith once delivered to the saints and confessed everywhere, always, by all, in the undivided Church through the ages.

As I noted about the place of the Scriptures, Anglican Catholics begin by reading the Scriptures together before endeavoring to read them privately. Further, even a private reading of Scripture must be informed, given structure and purpose, by the Church. This reflects the way we experience God's saving grace. The Father bestows His redemptive and perfective graces through His Son, by His Spirit, in His Church, to His children. It is within the sacramental life of the Body of Christ that we know God as He is, and so it is where we must encounter Him as He is revealed in the Scriptures.

Sadly, this is not how many are taught to approach the Scriptures. Christians living in the time since the Reformation, especially in the West, have been influenced by the opposing of a purist approach to Scripture, an entrenched defense of Tradition, and the unbounded exaltation of Reason. What the Church, in previous times, saw as an orderly harmony between modes of revelation, seems to have splintered into a cold war of suspicion. Biblical fundamentalists look at reason as depraved and tradition as agenda-driven. Traditionalists look at biblicism as naive and rationalism as self-deluding. Rationalism looks at fundamentalism as circular and tradition as ideology. Yet, it is essentially Christian to see how sign and meaning, form and matter, spirit and dust, are united in life by Christ. As St. Paul writes to the Colossians: all things hold together in Him.

One of the great retrievers of this sensibility for the Church and her Scriptures in the last century was the Roman Catholic scholar, Fr. Henri de Lubac (1896-1991). De Lubac’s work has been massively influential in healing some of the wounds that the skeptical crisis of the Reformation, along with the various rationalisms of the modern and post-modern world, have created for Protestants, Anglicans, and Roman Catholics alike in their self-understanding. His work, however, can tend to be a difficult climb for many readers, and so a generation of interpreters and appliers of his work have emerged in recent years to aid us in the way. The most influential interpreter of De Lubac’s work, for me, has been Dr. Susan K. Wood of Marquette University. An expert in De Lubac’s theology, Wood also applied it directly to what she calls the “spiritual exegesis of Scripture,” in which I find again the vital, imaginative, precise, and transformative approach to the Bible that has characterized the Church at her best moments. Her book Spiritual Exegesis is a worthy but lengthy read, so I’d like to draw from her insights to present a framework for maturing Christians to consider as they seek to engage with the Scriptures more deeply.

According to Wood, spiritual exegesis generally follows the historical tendencies of the Church’s reading practice, identifying four senses of Scripture: the literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical. The literal or historical sense is the sense directly conveyed by the words of the text. The allegorical sense interprets the literal sense in terms of Christ and the Church. The tropological sense applies the literal sense to an individual in formational and moral applications. The anagogical sense is the eschatological meaning of the text, or how it reveals how and toward what all things are tending as their purposes are revealed and fulfilled. For those who have been tracking through this series, they will notice that this enumeration of senses follows the tradition of fourfold senses, rather than the earlier tri-partite tradition. As Wood observes, though, the difference between the tripartite and the quadripartite delineation is not, in itself, very significant because the four-fold delineation simply divides the allegorical (or mystical) sense of the three-fold tradition into two senses—the allegorical and the anagogical. In short, they are not opposed—they are two ways of articulating the same senses.

The Literal or Historical Sense

A characteristic of Anglican practice is that dogma (essential truths of the Christian faith) can only proceed from the literal sense; theological proofs cannot be based on the allegorical sense. Wood observes that this principle respects the historical character of Christianity and distinguishes Christian allegory from non-historical allegory (what we typically mean when we use the word ‘myth’). This does not mean, however, that the figurative ceases to be a necessary function of historical interpretation. Many of the ‘historical’ portions of the Scriptures are written using figurative and poetic devices to convey their meaning. Wood correctly reminds us that attention to literary genres and the rules for reading them are essential to discerning the literary intention of the author and the theological content of the text. The historical or literal meaning can refer to the empirical historical event, but the allegorical meaning is also historical because history is always interpreted by the teller.

Unlike many modern historians who claim a pure and dispassionate telling of events, the Scriptures are conscious that history is witnessed and so offer us many witnesses in many times and many places, all attesting to one God. History is a story, and it is always told to express something. As it pertains to the Scriptures, the literal and every other sense are employed to convey the event that is the life and mission of Jesus Christ, regardless of how distant the event at hand is from Him in terms of chronology. He is the center of history. Wood reminds us that it is mistaken to suppose that the literal sense is historical and the other senses are ahistorical. This mistake is characteristic of our age, in which we hastily oppose fact and value statements. Historically, Christians have not seen the world as so divisible. Christians have always upheld the importance of what happened but have always seen this in relation to its anticipation or remembrance of Christ. The opposition letter/spirit is not, then, an opposition between literal and spiritual interpretation, but an opposition between two ways of knowing Christ, which then unfold in two ways of understanding our lives in Him as Christians.

The Allegorical Sense

Wood notes that the first and fundamental principle of the allegorical is not in history as narrative but in history as an event. It leads us from an attentive description about the parts of a thing to meditate on the unity of the thing. Take, for example, a simple illustration of a stick figure. It is possible to accurately describe the parts of the illustration as five line segments, four of which sharing a common point with the fifth, with a circle situated at a point of tangency with the terminal point of the fifth line segment. But there is a pattern that, once recognized, allows us to perceive that there is a unity greater than the sum of the parts, and that is a stick figure, the simple artistic rendering of a human body. The allegorical sense leads us to exercise the contemplative capacity of the mind that moves from what a thing seems like to what a thing is.

De Lubac uses the term allegory as the spiritual interpretation of whole historical events—vastly more complex than the stick figure—to perceive what an event is in terms of what it means in the scope of God’s providence. Wood asserts that far from compromising the historical foundation of the Faith, however, the allegorical sense assures the essentially historical character of the faith since it does not seek its referent apart from the literal or historical meaning, but within it. A contemplative view of Scripture in the allegorical sense allows us to see that God is not distant from history, but is a participant in history because history depends upon and participates in Him for its very existence, while yet being distinct from Him. In short, we begin to see history as sacramental; the Scriptures are about Christ and the Church.

The Tropological and Moral Sense

The allegorical sense bridges the gap between a distant historical event that cannot be perfectly re-created, to perceive that in those events is the provident love of God who continues with His creation and creatures. The more we engage the literal and allegorical to the nth degree together, the more we will begin to see an elegant pattern emerge that guides our understanding of what God wills for us and what will lead us toward beatitude in His new creation. Thus, from the allegorical, we begin to have a sense of the tropological and moral senses of Scripture, how the revelation of God is sacramentally applied, by analogy, to the life of the Church and of every Christian member.

Wood notes that the tropological sense presupposes not only the mystery of Christ—we have to begin with the assumption that the Scriptures hold together in Him as their center—but also the Church, since “the Church only exists in Christian souls and souls are Christian only in the Church.” A Church is the Body of Christ instantiated in the world; dioceses are instantiations of the whole Church in a given place; parishes are local embassies of those dioceses; and parishioners are representatives of their parish wherever they go. They are all joined together in a common sacramental life in Christ who is present by the Spirit at every level of the living organism that is the Church, directing her life toward fullness and perfection. Each life is a microcosm of the Church and is able to be united to the Word of God because the Church is united with Christ. Redemptive action finds its terminus in the individual, although the individual is always considered a member of the one Lord Jesus Christ.

The position of the tropological sense is important because it corrects a common error of moving directly from the literal sense to the moral sense. This error is prevalent in many biblicist traditions, particularly those given to a fundamentalist tendency to read Scripture in a single, simple, and plain sense. Allegorical interpretation becomes suspect because it requires a move from the evidentiary toward the imaginative and mystical. The tropological sense collapses soon afterward as the architecture of reality condenses rapidly to become a matter of direct, divine action on each human person, without mediation. The moral sense becomes a naked encounter with divine perfection, discerned by every individual Christian through their Bible and unaided interpreting imagination. The moral sense becomes sublime and terrifying as each Christian is called to perfection without the aid of the sacramental life of the Church except insofar as they can justify its instrumental use to cushion the terror of their exposure before God. The moral life becomes a piecemeal application of odds and ends from Holy Writ.

The Anagogical Sense

On the basis of the literal, allegorical, and tropological/moral senses, the anagogical sense directs our reading of Scripture to anticipate Christ’s triumphant return at the end of time. De Lubac notes that there are two anagogical senses. The first is eschatological; the second is mystical. In the first sense, the anagogical perceives that history is not just repeating itself cyclically but is heading toward an end, and that end is a face-to-face encounter with the enthroned Jesus Christ. The Scriptures tell us that “every eye will behold Him,” and this beholding will cause terror and panic for some and great joy and vindication for others. Living in an ambiently Christianized society, we can take for granted our understanding that history is tending toward an end. Almost invariably, pagan cultures envisioned history as endlessly cyclical and everlasting. It is only within a few centuries of the first advent of Christ that a sudden shift occurred to consider that the cycles were moving toward something. The first gift of the anagogical sense is that Creation is made for a good purpose that God means to accomplish.

The second gift of the anagogical sense, though, is the lens needed to perceive that the end of all things has already come upon us because the end is a person, and that Person is the Lord Jesus. We are in the last days because the end of the world has come in the life and mission of Jesus Christ, particularly revealed in His Passion and Resurrection. The anagogical view of Scripture leads us to perceive how the life of the world was made manifest, and the world conspired against Him to crucify Him, dealing itself a death blow from which it cannot recover. We are in the last days because we are participants in a world that killed the Lord of Life. The Resurrection, moreover, revealed to us that which comes after the death of the world—the renewal of all things as God’s own life is poured out to bless the Creation with immortality. As Christians, we can perceive through the anagogical lens that we are always present at the Cross where the world died; we are always walking through the corpse of the old creation; we are always experiencing the atonement of Christ’s Blood shed on the Cross; and we are always experiencing the blessedness of being seated with Him in the heavenly places as His resurrection life now grows quietly within us.

How We Read

Wood concludes that despite the criticism leveled against it by fundamentalist readers of Scripture, the spiritual interpretation of Scripture is limited because there are not many different meanings but one meaning. The one object of Scripture is Christ, what De Lubac calls “the radical criterion” of all interpretation, and the unity of this object unifies the various meanings. Allegory is not an association invented by an imaginative biblical commentator, but is inherent to the historical events expressed in the biblical narrative. The senses of interpretation are neither successive nor progressive methods of reading a biblical text that can be separated one from the other, but rather demonstrate a dense unity of meanings within the historical events that ground the biblical text. As Wood observes in De Lubac’s theology, “The real symbolism, the real presence of Christ, inherent in this form of exegesis makes it properly to be called sacramental and mystical.”

As Christians who assume a sacramental worldview, our reading of Scripture observes this density of meaning. Anglican Catholics are a Scriptural tradition in that we read and study the Bible all the time but do so within the sacramental organism of the Church. Our doctrinal sensibilities require the literal sense—we are not a mystery religion. The rich symbolism of liturgical worship, engaging all the senses, forms the setting where we first encounter the Scriptures and elicits the full scope of our spiritual imagination, so that the allegorical sense can find a place in us. Our reception of the Scriptures is situated in common prayer so that the tropological sense of participation in God’s chosen people initiates us into a relationship with God among a cloud of innumerable witnesses to Him. Through catechism, preaching, and direction, our sense of the moral life and the demands of love for God and neighbor emerge as they obtain in each of our lives a call to do good unto all, beginning with those of the household of faith. And finally, our sense of time and the pattern of our life as a Church puts us constantly in the life of Christ, as we look expectantly toward His second and glorious Advent, perceiving within our churches and ourselves the signs that this advent is ever nearer.

As a Church, we read the Scriptures, and we live the Scriptures because, in the words of the Scriptures, we encounter the Word made flesh, by whom all things were made, who dwells among us and who is with us, even unto to the end of the age.