HOW TO READ THE BIBLE
Bishop Kallistos Ware
WE BELIEVE THAT THE SCRIPTURES constitute a coherent
whole. They are at once divinely inspired and humanly expressed. They bear
authoritative witness to God's revelation of Himself - in creation, in the
Incarnation of the Word, and the whole history of salvation. And as such they
express the word of God in human language. We know, receive, and
interpret Scripture through the Church and in the Church. Our approach to the
Bible is one of obedience.
We may distinguish four key qualities that mark an
Orthodox reading of Scripture, namely
- our reading should
be obedient,
- it should be ecclesial, within
the Church,
- it should be Christ-centered,
- it should be personal.
Reading
the Bible with Obedience
FIRST OF ALL, when reading Scripture, we are to listen
in a spirit of obedience. The Orthodox Church believes in divine
inspiration of the Bible. Scripture is a "letter" from God, where
Christ Himself is speaking. The Scriptures are God's authoritative witness of
Himself. They express the Word of God in our human language. Since God Himself
is speaking to us in the Bible, our response is rightly one of obedience, of
receptivity, and listening. As we read, we wait on the Spirit.
But, while divinely inspired, the Bible is also humanly
expressed. It is a whole library of different books written at varying
times by distinct persons. Each book of the Bible reflects the outlook of the
age in which it was written and the particular viewpoint of the author. For God
does nothing in isolation, divine grace cooperates with human freedom. God does
not abolish our individuality but enhances it. And so it is in the writing of
inspired Scripture. The authors were not just a passive instrument, a dictation
machine recording a message. Each writer of Scripture contributes his
particular personal gifts. Alongside the divine aspect, there is also a human
element in Scripture. We are to value both.
Each of the four Gospels, for example, has its own
particular approach. Matthew presents more particularly a Jewish understanding
of Christ, with an emphasis on the kingdom of heaven. Mark contains specific,
picturesque details of Christ's ministry not given elsewhere. Luke expresses
the universality of Christ's love, His all-embracing compassion that extends
equally to Jew and to Gentile. In John there is a more inward and more mystical
approach to Christ, with an emphasis on divine light and divine indwelling. We
are to enjoy and explore to the full this life-giving variety within the Bible.
Because Scripture is in this way the word of God
expressed in human language, there is room for honest and exacting inquiry when
studying the Bible. Exploring the human aspect of the Bible, we are to use to
the full our God-given human reason. The Orthodox Church does not exclude
scholarly research into the origin, dates, and authorship of books of the
Bible.
Alongside this human element, however, we see always
the divine element. These are not simply books written by individual human
writers. We hear in Scripture not just human words, marked by a greater or
lesser skill and perceptiveness, but the eternal, uncreated Word of God
Himself, the divine Word of salvation. When we come to the Bible, then, we come
not simply out of curiosity, to gain information. We come to the Bible with a
specific question, a personal question about ourselves: "How can I
be saved?"
As God's divine word of salvation in human language,
Scripture should evoke in us a sense of wonder. Do you ever feel, as you read
or listen, that it has all become too familiar? Has the Bible grown rather
boring? Continually we need to cleanse the doors of our perception and to look
in amazement with new eyes at what the Lord sets before us.
We are to feel toward the Bible with a sense of
wonder, and sense of expectation and surprise. There are so many rooms in
Scripture that we have yet to enter. There is so much depth and majesty
for us to discover. If obedience means wonder, it also means listening.
We are better at talking than listening. We hear the
sound of our own voice, but often we don't pause to hear the voice of the other
person who is speaking to us. So the first requirement, as we read Scripture,
is to stop talking and to listen - to listen with obedience.
When we enter an Orthodox Church, decorated in the
traditional manner, and look up toward the sanctuary at the east end, we see
there, in the apse, an icon of the Virgin Mary with her hands raised to heaven
- the ancient Scriptural manner of praying that many still use today. This icon
symbolizes the attitude we are to assume as we read Scripture - an attitude of receptivity,
of hands invisibly raised to heaven. Reading the Bible, we are to model
ourselves on the Blessed Virgin Mary, for she is supremely the one who listens.
At the Annunciation she listens with obedience and responds to the angel, "Be
it unto me according to thy word" (Luke 1:38). She could not have
borne the Word of God in her body if she had not first, listened to the Word of
God in her heart. After the shepherds have adored the newborn Christ, it is
said of her: "Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her
heart" (Luke 2:19). Again, when Mary finds Jesus in the temple, we are
told: "His mother kept all these things in her heart" (Luke
2:5l). The same need for listening is emphasized in the last words attributed
to the Mother of God in Scripture, at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee: "Whatsoever
He saith unto you, do it" (John 2:5), she says to the servants - and
to all of us.
In all this the Blessed Virgin Mary serves as a
mirror, as a living icon of the Biblical Christian. We are to be like her as we
hear the Word of God: pondering, keeping all these things in our hearts, doing
whatever He tells us. We are to listen in obedience as God speaks.
Understanding
the Bible Through the Church
IN THE SECOND PLACE, we should receive and interpret
Scripture through the Church and in the Church. Our approach to the Bible is
not only obedient but ecclesial.
It is the Church that tells us what is Scripture. A book is not part of
Scripture because of any particular theory about its dating and authorship.
Even if it could be proved, for example, that the Fourth Gospel was not
actually written by John the beloved disciple of Christ, this would not alter
the fact that we Orthodox accept the Fourth Gospel as Holy Scripture. Why?
Because the Gospel of John is accepted by the Church and in the Church.
It is the Church that tells us what is Scripture, and
it is also the Church that tells us how Scripture is to be understood. Coming
upon the Ethiopian as he read the Old Testament in his chariot, Philip the
Apostle asked him, "Understandest thou what thou readest?" And
the Ethiopian answered, "How can I, unless some man should guide
me?" (Acts 8:30-31). We are all in the position of the Ethiopian. The
words of Scripture are not always self-explanatory. God speaks directly to the
heart of each one of us as we read our Bible. Scripture reading is a personal
dialogue between each one of us and Christ - but we also need guidance.
And our guide is the Church. We make full use of our own personal
understanding, assisted by the Spirit, we make full use of the findings of
modern Biblical research, but always we submit private opinion - whether our
own or that of the scholars - to the total experience of the Church throughout
the ages.
The Orthodox standpoint here is summed up in the
question asked of a convert at the reception service used by the Russian
Church: "Do you acknowledge that the Holy Scripture must be accepted and interpreted
in accordance with the belief which has been handed down by the Holy Fathers,
and which the Holy Orthodox Church, our Mother, has always held and still does
hold?"
We read the Bible personally, but not as isolated
individuals. We read as the members of a family, the family of the Orthodox
Catholic Church. When reading Scripture, we say not
"I" but "We." We read in communion with all the
other members of the Body of Christ, in all parts of the world and in all
generations of time. The decisive test and criterion for our understanding of
what the Scripture means is the mind of the Church. The Bible is the
book of the Church.
To discover this "mind of the Church," where
do we begin? Our first step is to see how Scripture is used in worship. How, in
particular, are Biblical lessons chosen for reading at the different feasts? We
should also consult the writings of the Church Fathers, and consider how they
interpret the Bible. Our Orthodox manner of reading Scripture is in this way
both liturgical and patristic. And this, as we all realize, is far from easy to
do in practice, because we have at our disposal so few Orthodox commentaries on
Scripture available in English, and most of the Western commentaries do not
employ this liturgical and Patristic approach.
As an example of what it means to interpret Scripture
in a liturgical way, guided by the use made of it at Church feasts, let us look
at the Old Testament lessons appointed for Vespers on the Feast of the
Annunciation. They are three in number: Genesis 28:10-17; Jacob's dream of a
ladder set up from earth to heaven; Ezekiel 43:27-44:4; the prophet's vision of
the Jerusalem sanctuary, with the closed gate through which none but the Prince
may pass; Proverbs 9:1-11: one of the great Sophianic passages in the Old
Testament, beginning "Wisdom has built her house."
These texts in the Old Testament, then, as their
selection for the feast of the Virgin Mary indicates, are all to be understood
as prophecies concerning the Incarnation from the Virgin. Mary is Jacob's
ladder, supplying the flesh that God incarnate takes upon entering our human
world. Mary is the closed gate who alone among women bore a child while still
remaining inviolate. Mary provides the house which Christ the Wisdom of God (1
Cor. 1:24) takes as his dwelling. Exploring in this manner the choice of
lessons for the various feasts, we discover layers of Biblical interpretation
that are by no means obvious on a first reading.
Take as another example Vespers on Holy Saturday, the
first part of the ancient Paschal Vigil. Here we have no less than fifteen Old
Testament lessons. This sequence of lessons sets before us the whole scheme of
sacred history, while at the same time underlining the deeper meaning of
Christ's Resurrection. First among the lessons is Genesis 1:1-13, the account
of Creation: Christ's Resurrection is a new Creation. The fourth lesson is the
book of Jonah in its entirety, with the prophet's three days in the belly of
the whale foreshadowing Christ's Resurrection after three days in the tomb (cf.
Matthew 12:40). The sixth lesson recounts the crossing of the Red Sea by the
Israelites (Exodus 13:20-15:19), which anticipates the new Passover of Pascha
whereby Christ passes over from death to life (cf. 1 Corinthians 5:7; 10:1-4).
The final lesson is the story of the three Holy Children in the fiery furnace
(Daniel 3), once more a "type" or prophecy of Christ's rising
from the tomb.
Such is the effect of reading Scripture ecclesially,
in the Church and with the Church. Studying the Old Testament in this
liturgical way and using the Fathers to help us, everywhere we uncover
signposts pointing forward to the mystery of Christ and of His Mother. Reading
the Old Testament in the light of the New, and the New in the light of the, Old
- as the Church's calendar encourages us to do - we discover the unity of Holy
Scripture. One of the best ways of identifying correspondences between the Old
and New Testaments is to use a good Biblical concordance. This can often tell
us more about the meaning of Scripture than any commentary.
In Bible study groups within our parishes, it is
helpful to give one person the special task of noting whenever a particular
passage in the Old or New Testament is used for a festival or a saint's day. We
can then discuss together the reasons why each specific passage has been so
chosen. Others in the group can be assigned to do homework among the Fathers,
using for example the Biblical homilies of Saint John Chrysostom (which have
been translated into English). Christians need to acquire a patristic mind.
Christ,
the Heart of the Bible
THE THIRD ELEMENT in our reading of Scripture is that
it should be Christ-centered. The Scriptures constitute a coherent
whole because they all are Christ-centered. Salvation through the Messiah
is their central and unifying topic. He is as a "thread" that runs
through all of Holy Scripture, from the first sentence to the last. We have
already mentioned the way in which Christ may be seen foreshadowed on the pages
of the Old Testament.
Much modern critical study of Scripture in the West
has adopted an analytical approach, breaking up each book into different
sources. The connecting links are unraveled, and the Bible is reduced to a
series of bare primary units. There is certainly value in this. But we need to
see the unity as well as the diversity of Scripture, the all-embracing end as
well as the scattered beginnings. Orthodoxy prefers on the whole a synthetic
rather than an analytical approach, seeing Scripture as an integrated whole,
with Christ everywhere as the bond of union.
Always we seek for the point of convergence between
the Old Testament and the New, and this we find in Jesus Christ. Orthodoxy
assigns particular significance to the "typological" method of
interpretation, whereby "types" of Christ, signs and symbols
of His work, are discerned throughout the Old Testament. A notable example of
this is Melchizedek, the priest-king of Salem, who offered bread and wine to
Abraham (Genesis 14:18), and who is seen as a type of Christ not only by the
Fathers but even in the New Testament itself (Hebrews 5:6; 7:l). Another
instance is the way in which, as we have seen, the Old Passover foreshadows the
New; Israel's deliverance from Pharaoh at the Red Sea anticipates our
deliverance from sin through the death and Resurrection of the Savior. This is
the method of interpretation that we are to apply throughout the Bible. Why,
for instance, in the second half of Lent are the Old Testament readings from
Genesis dominated by the figure of Joseph? Why in Holy Week do we read from the
book of Job? Because Joseph and Job are innocent sufferers, and as such they
are types or foreshadowings of Jesus Christ, whose innocent suffering upon the
Cross the Church is at the point of celebrating. It all ties up.
A Biblical Christian is the one who, wherever he
looks, on every page of Scripture, finds everywhere Christ.
The
Bible as Personal
IN THE WORDS of an early ascetic writer in the
Christian East, Saint Mark the Monk: "He who is humble in his thoughts and
engaged in spiritual work, when he reads the Holy Scriptures, will apply
everything to himself and not to his neighbor." As Orthodox Christians we
are to look everywhere in Scripture for a personal application. We are
to ask not just "What does it mean?" but "What does it mean to
me?" Scripture is a personal dialogue between the Savior and myself -
Christ speaking to me, and me answering. That is the fourth criterion in our
Bible reading.
I am to see all the stories in Scripture as part of my
own personal story. Who is Adam? The name Adam means "man,"
"human," and so the Genesis account of Adam's fall is also a story
about me. I am Adam. It is to me that God speaks when He says to Adam,
"Where art thou?" (Genesis 3:9). "Where is God?" we often
ask. But the real question is what God asks the Adam in each of us: "Where
art thou?"
When, in the story of Cain and Abel, we read God's
words to Cain, "Where is Abel thy brother?" (Genesis 4:9), these
words, too, are addressed to each of us. Who is Cain? It is myself. And God
asks the Cain in each of us, "Where is thy brother?" The way to God
lies through love of other people, and there is no other way. Disowning my
brother, I replace the image of God with the mark of Cain, and deny my own
vital humanity.
In reading Scripture, we may take three steps. First,
what we have in Scripture is sacred history: the history of the world from the
Creation, the history of the chosen people, the history of God Incarnate in
Palestine, and the "mighty works" after Pentecost. The Christianity that
we find in the Bible is not an ideology, not a philosophical theory, but a
historical faith.
Then we are to take a second step. The history
presented in the Bible is a personal history. We see God intervening at
specific times and in specific places, as He enters into dialogue with
individual persons. He addresses each one by name. We see set before us the
specific calls issued by God to Abraham, Moses and David, to Rebekah and Ruth,
to Isaiah and the prophets, and then to Mary and the Apostles. We see the
selectivity of the divine action in history, not as a scandal but as a
blessing. God's love is universal in scope, but He chooses to become Incarnate
in a particular comer of the earth, at a particular time and from a particular
Mother. We are in this manner to savor all the uniqueness of God's action as
recorded in Scripture. The person who loves the Bible loves details of dating
and geography. Orthodoxy has an intense devotion to the Holy Land, to the exact
places where Christ lived and taught, died and rose again. An excellent way to
enter more deeply into our Scripture reading is to undertake a pilgrimage to
Jerusalem and Galilee. Walk where Christ walked. Go down to the Dead Sea, sit
alone on the rocks, feel how Christ felt during the forty days of His
temptation in the wilderness. Drink from the well where He spoke with the
Samaritan woman. Go at night to the Garden of Gethsemane, sit in the dark under
the ancient olives and look across the valley to the lights of the city.
Experience to the full the reality of the historical setting, and take that
experience back with you to your daily Scripture reading.
Then we are to take a third step. Reliving Biblical
history in all its particularity, we are to apply it directly to ourselves. We
are to say to ourselves, "All these places and events are not just far
away and long ago, but are also part of my own personal encounter with Christ. The stories include me."
Betrayal, for example, is part of the personal story
of everyone. Have we not all betrayed others at some time in our life, and have
we not all known what it is to be betrayed, and does not the memory of these
moments leave continuing scars on our psyche? Reading, then, the account of
Saint Peter's betrayal of Christ and of his restoration after the Resurrection,
we can see ourselves as actors in the story. Imagining what both Peter and
Jesus must have experienced at the moment immediately after the betrayal, we
enter into their feelings and make them our own. I am Peter; in this situation
can I also be Christ? Reflecting likewise on the process of reconciliation -
seeing how the Risen Christ with a love utterly devoid of sentimentality
restored the fallen Peter to fellowship, seeing how Peter on his side had the
courage to accept this restoration - we ask ourselves: How Christ-like am I to
those who have betrayed me? And, after my own acts of betrayal, am I able to
accept the forgiveness of others - am I able to forgive myself? Or am I timid,
mean, holding myself back, never ready to give myself fully to anything, either
good or bad? As the Desert Fathers say, "Better someone who has sinned, if
he knows he has sinned and repents, than a person who has not sinned and thinks
of himself as righteous."
Have I gained the boldness of Saint Mary Magdalene,
her constancy and loyalty, when she went out to anoint the body of Christ in
the tomb (John 20:l)? Do I hear the Risen Savior call me by name, as He called
her, and do I respond Rabboni (Teacher) with her simplicity and
completeness (John 20:16)?
Reading Scripture in this way - in obedience, as a
member of the Church, finding Christ everywhere, seeing everything as a part of
my own personal story - we shall sense something of the variety and depth to be
found in the Bible. Yet always we shall feel that in our Biblical exploration
we are only at the very beginning. We are like someone launching out in a tiny
boat across a limitless ocean.
"Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a
light unto my path" (Psalm 118 [119]:105).