How to Read the Bible

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by 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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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 corner 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.

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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).

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