Reading with the church

Peter reads Paul

The New Testament shows us an apostle reading another apostle. Near the end of his second letter, Peter writes about Paul's letters:

Consider also that our Lord’s patience brings salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom God gave him. He writes this way in all his letters, speaking in them about such matters. Some parts of his letters are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction.

2 Peter 3:15-16

Several things stand out. Peter sets Paul's letters beside "the rest of the Scriptures". He, an apostle, admits that some parts are hard to understand, so finding a passage hard is no sign that we are reading badly. The danger lies elsewhere: in people who are untaught and unsteady twisting the hard places to suit themselves.

Yet Peter does not tell his readers to stop reading Paul. He opens this chapter by reminding them of "what was foretold by the holy prophets and commanded by our Lord and Savior through your apostles" (2 Peter 3:2), and he closes it by urging them not to "fall from your secure standing" but to "grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ" (2 Peter 3:17-18). The one who reads Scripture well does not stand alone. We read within what the prophets and apostles handed down, together with the church that received it.

Scripture, the faith, the plain sense

The church has put this way of reading into a few principles. The first is that Scripture explains Scripture. The Westminster Confession of the Presbyterian churches says:

The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself; and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any scripture (which is not manifold, but one), it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly.

ch. 1.9

Jesus said, "the Father is greater than I" (John 14:28). In the fourth century the followers of Arius, who taught that the Son was a created being, made much of this verse. But in the same Gospel Jesus also says, "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30), and Paul writes that Christ, existing in the form of God, emptied himself and took the form of a servant (Philippians 2:6-7). Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa, reads these together: "In that He was man, He went; in that He was God, He stayed" Augustine. The story of that controversy belongs to the theology course: Nicaea: is the Son truly God?

The second principle is to read within the faith the church has confessed. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons in the second century, summed up the one faith that the church, scattered through the whole world, had received from the apostles. Teachers differ in ability, he said, but none may change what that faith contains. What a gifted teacher can do is "bring out the meaning of those things which have been spoken in parables, and accommodate them to the general scheme of the faith" Against Heresies 1.10.3. This summary of the apostolic faith is called the rule of faith, and creeds such as the Apostles' Creed hold it in brief. Reading a verse in the light of the whole faith in this way is called the analogy of faith. If our reading of a verse gives us a different God from the Father, Son and Holy Spirit the creeds confess, it is our reading that needs another look.

The third principle is to look first for the plain sense. The Reformers took the true meaning of Scripture to be what its author actually said, in his own words and grammar and setting: its grammatical and historical sense. The Westminster Confession holds that the decrees of councils and the opinions of ancient writers are all to be examined by the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture ch. 1.10. The Reformed churches read the Fathers and the creeds with respect, and set them under Scripture: the church's long reading is a guide, not a master. The grounds for this are taught in the Reformed course's lesson Scripture alone, and the essay How should we read the Bible? gathers these rules in brief.

How the churches have read

The Fathers and the medieval church read spiritual senses beyond the literal one. John Cassian, a monk of Marseille in fifth-century Gaul, took Jerusalem as his example: in the literal sense (he called it the historical), it is the city of the Jews; in the allegorical, the church of Christ; in the moral, the human soul; and in the anagogical, the sense that looks up to heaven, the heavenly city John Cassian, Conferences 14.8. The history of these four senses is told in the theology course's Interpreting Scripture and How the Fathers read Scripture.

The Catholic Church teaches that Scripture and sacred Tradition together make up a single treasury of God's word, given to the church to keep; that the charge of interpreting that word with authority has been given to the church's teaching office, the Magisterium; and that this office does not stand over the word of God but is its servant Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum 10. It speaks of the literal sense, on which every other sense rests, and of three spiritual senses built on it, the allegorical, the moral and the anagogical; and it holds that in the end it is for the church to judge how Scripture is to be interpreted Catechism of the Catholic Church 115–119.

Georges Florovsky, a theologian of the Orthodox church of the East, says that Scripture is given in the church and read in the church. Tradition, for him, is not a second source added to Scripture but the church's living memory, reading Scripture rightly with the Fathers Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition. The Orthodox hear and sing the Scriptures above all in the church's worship.

Most churches agree that Scripture is not to be explained by private whim, that it is read within the faith the church has confessed, and that the Fathers are worth hearing. Where they differ is the authority of the church's reading. The Catholic and Orthodox churches read Scripture with authority within the church's living Tradition; the Reformed churches receive that tradition gratefully and test all of it by Scripture.

Try it

Open Acts 15 on the map. In the map under the Jesus tab, open Acts and tap chapter 15: it has a ‘One-line summary’ and ‘Notes’. ‘Read Acts 15’ opens the text. Here the church in Jerusalem reads Scripture together, faced with a question: must Gentile believers keep the law of Moses?

Read verses 6 to 21 and note who speaks, and from what. The apostles and elders meet; Peter, Barnabas and Paul tell what God has done; James quotes the prophets. Write it down simply: ‘vv. 7-11: what Peter saw’, ‘vv. 15-17: the prophets James quotes’.

Let Scripture explain Scripture at verse 16. Tap verse 16, then Study and Cross-refs, and find the passage in Amos that James quotes. Then open the Commentary tab and read Wesley's short note on verse 15. In the one-line summary, put in a sentence what the meeting decided, and how.

Practice