From the Desk of the Pastor for April 13, 2025

The Lord be with you! Approaching the Bible with reverence and intelligence is the heart of theology. In this article we will go over how to start reading and praying with the Word of God.

The reverence part is simple but all too often forgotten. Whenever we read Sacred Scripture, we must do so as prayer. The Bible is not a puzzle to be solved; it is the Revelation of God to us. A few rules suffice. First, before beginning to read, stop and pray. The Sign of the Cross made with care is enough to ready a soul to read the Word of God. Second, treat the physical Bible with care. It does not go onto the ground. It should be opened and closed with care and solemnity. Third, we read with our full attention upon the text or as much attention as we can muster. Fourth, we should pray an act of thanksgiving afterwards.

So we are praying the Bible with the right attitude; how do we understand it? Where does God’s inspiration end and the human author’s own initiative take over? Here we come to the biggest error we can make: thinking that it is either human or divine. As Catholics we believe with the assent of faith that the entire Bible was inspired by God directly, “God is the author of Sacred Scripture. The divinely revealed realities, which are contained and presented in the text of Sacred Scripture, have been written down under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit” (CCC 105).

Here we need to differentiate between the literal and spiritual senses of Scripture. 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.” 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.

• 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.

• 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".

• 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 (CCC 116-117).

Since the spiritual sense depends on the literal sense, we must first establish the literal sense and then expand into the spiritual sense. We will go over the difficulties of knowing the literal sense next week before going into the depths of the spiritual sense. For now we just need to remember that God does not contradict himself. Human authors may err, but God does not. More importantly, whereas human arts have a limit, the Divine never ends.

In His Sacred Heart,
Fr. John