For many people, reading the Bible can be hard. There are bits that seem easy to follow (like when Jesus teaches people), that seem irrelevant (tell me again about eating shellfish in the desert), that are obviously picture language or poetry (the trees in the fields don’t literally clap their hands), and that just seem weird (all of Revelation).
Then there is the way Biblical authors use other bits of the Bible. For example, John the Baptist looks at Jesus and describes him as “the lamb of God, that takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29), St Paul writes about the stories of Israel finding water in a rock only to say “the Rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4). It is perfectly reasonable to ask: what on earth is going on?
The church has always believed that the Bible is a book that operates on a number of levels. I recently came across this summary of how this works in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (paragraphs 109-118). It really helped me to categorise the different ways we engage with Scripture. I’ve reproduced it below (with some of my explanation at the end of each section) in case it helps you too.
First, read what the authors meant:
109 In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm, and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words.
110 In order to discover the sacred authors’ intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking and narrating then current. “For the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts, and in other forms of literary expression.”
This means that we can’t always simply read the text literalistically. Instead we need to work out what the original author meant and how his readers would have understood his words.
We do this all the time in English. If I said “it’s raining cats-and-dogs outside”, you get an umbrella. You don’t call the RSPCA. You know that in English that is an idiom or metaphor, not literal. And it would be completely inappropriate to treat it like it was.
Sometimes it’s appropriate to read the Bible like a history book (for example when dealing with the Gospels or biographies). Sometimes it’s obviously not (for example when dealing with the poetry in the Psalms). Sometimes it’s complicated because the Bible uses types of books that we aren’t familiar with (like collections of Proverbs or Paleo-History).
Things that can help with this are Pastors and good Bible commentaries.
Second, read Scripture as a whole, assuming that it is coherent and bearing in mind that Jesus is the point of it all:
112 Be especially attentive “to the content and unity of the whole Scripture”. Different as the books which compose it may be, Scripture is a unity by reason of the unity of God’s plan, of which Christ Jesus is the center and heart, open since his Passover.
The phrase “heart of Christ” can refer to Sacred Scripture, which makes known his heart, closed before the Passion, as the Scripture was obscure. But the Scripture has been opened since the Passion; since those who from then on have understood it, consider and discern in what way the prophecies must be interpreted.
This means that as Christians we believe that the Bible has lots of human authors (all writing in their own personalities and using their own styles) but one divine mind behind it. To put it another way, Scripture is loads of books but together they tell one story. And that story is ultimately about Jesus.
This means when you take two texts that seem hard to reconcile or contradict one another, they can almost certainly be read as complementing each other or as talking about different things. If you find something that troubles you in this way talk to a Pastor (or read a good commentary).
Third, read with the Church:
113 2. Read the Scripture within “the living Tradition of the whole Church”. According to a saying of the Fathers, Sacred Scripture is written principally in the Church’s heart rather than in documents and records, for the Church carries in her Tradition the living memorial of God’s Word, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives her the spiritual interpretation of the Scripture (“. . . according to the spiritual meaning which the Spirit grants to the Church”).
114 3. Be attentive to the analogy of faith. By “analogy of faith” we mean the coherence of the truths of faith among themselves and within the whole plan of Revelation.
The Bible is a book that is meant to be read in community. Jesus promises that as we live together as the Church, we are guided by his Spirit and learn how to read the Bible correctly (eg John 15:26). This goes for the Church in the world now but also throughout time. We want to hear how the Spirit has directed us to read Scripture, and that means reading it in the community of the Church. It also means that sometimes we have to have the humility to accept that we may have misunderstood something from Scripture and to be corrected.
Four, pay attention to the different senses of Scripture:
115 According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral and anagogical senses. the profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church.
116 The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: “All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal.”83
117 The spiritual sense. Thanks to the unity of God’s plan, not only the text of Scripture but also the realities and events about which it speaks can be signs.
1. the allegorical sense. We can acquire a more profound understanding of events by recognizing their significance in Christ; thus the crossing of the Red Sea is a sign or type of Christ’s victory and also of Christian Baptism.
2. the moral sense. the events reported in Scripture ought to lead us to act justly. As St. Paul says, they were written “for our instruction”.
3. the anagogical sense (Greek: anagoge, “leading”). We can view realities and events in terms of their eternal significance, leading us toward our true homeland: thus the Church on earth is a sign of the heavenly Jerusalem.
118 A medieval couplet summarizes the significance of the four senses:
The Letter speaks of deeds; Allegory to faith;
The Moral how to act; Anagogy our destiny.
This is the hardest bit for us to grasp but it makes sense of how the apostles and other Biblical writers used Scripture and unlocks a lot of what God is wanting to tell us through it.
Put simply, there are four ways that we can interpret different bits of the Bible. They aren’t contradictory – they are like levels of meaning (kind of like a Russian doll). They are:
- The “Letter” or “Literal” sense.
This doesn’t mean taking everything literally. It means asking what a passage would have meant to the original readers. This is what we talked about above. It means reading bits of the Bible according to the type of book they are (poetry, history etc). It is the basic question: what is the writer trying to say here. For a lot of modern Bible scholars, this is as far as they go (which is a shame and means we miss a lot of meaning that the ancient church understood). - The “allegorical” sense.
This means way that the bits of the Bible we are reading teach us lessons about Jesus even when he doesn’t explicitly appear. This is what John the Baptist is doing when he describes Jesus as the “Lamb of God” or what St Paul is doing when he describes a Rock from the Old Testament as being about Jesus. It realises that when God inspired the Bible he was always pointing us to Jesus, even when the original authors didn’t realise it. So, for example, the story of the creation of Adam and Eve is designed to teach us about Jesus and the church (see Ephesians 5:31-32). Another word for this is Typology. - The Moral sense.
This is obvious. Bits of the Bible are designed to teach us how to behave. When it says “don’t steal”, you don’t need to reach for a commentary (particularly if the commentary isn’t yours). Other narratives can also teach moral lessons. So, for example, the story of Cain and Abel can teach valuable moral lessons about the danger of anger, jealousy and the destructive consequences of violence. - The “anagogical” or “mystical” sense.
Stories we find in Scripture can ultimately teach us something important about our eternal destiny in Jesus. So, for example, the story of God bringing Israel out of slavery in Egypt, through a time of trials and testing in the desert, over a river (literally through something that kills people) and into a promised land is a picture of the way God rescues souls, leads them through life and brings them through death to heaven.
You don’t need to be an expert at spotting all these levels of meaning in Scripture right away. One of the good things about being part of a Church is that many men and women have spent their lives meditating on Scripture and explaining to us what they saw so that we can see it too. It’s also part of why God gives the church teachers – so that we can grow in understanding him and his word to us.
Deep Church 