Four Reasons Why We No Longer Know How to Read Scripture: A Path to Recovering the Vision of the Early Church

I want to begin with a provocative claim—one that, as we’ll see, is not only well-founded but necessary: we no longer know how to read Scripture. More often than not, our reading does not edify but instead alienates us from God. It erects barriers between us and any true understanding of Him—barriers made of idolatrous conceptions of God, the world, and His relation to it.

How can I make such a claim? As the following essay will show, I do so for a number of reasons: our misunderstanding of the nature of the text itself, our confusion about the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, our distorted sense of how Scripture is meant to be read, and our failure to grasp how theology relates to the Bible in the first place.

Toward a Recovery of Reading

If we are to recover the ability to truly read Scripture, we must first diagnose the habits of mind and assumptions that prevent us from doing so. In what follows, I will examine four major distortions in our approach to the Bible: our misunderstanding of its nature, our misreading of the relationship between the Testaments, our loss of a proper mode of reading, and our severing of theology from the scriptural witness itself. Each has contributed to the crisis of reading—and each must be addressed if we are to reclaim a living encounter with the Word.

1. Mistaking the Order: Reading the Bible from Genesis Instead of from Christ

One of the most pervasive misunderstandings about the Bible is the assumption that it is meant to be read cover to cover, beginning with Genesis and proceeding in linear fashion—from creation, to fall, to Israel’s history, to Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection, to the Church, and finally to the eschaton. This is, in a certain sense, the default Protestant (and often popular Orthodox and Catholic) imagination of the biblical arc: a chronological unfolding of salvation history that begins in Eden and ends in Revelation. It is how many of us were taught to think of Scripture—as a unified narrative to be read like any other book. But while this seems reasonable, even reverent, it actually obscures the most essential thing about how the Bible is meant to be read as a Christian: not in temporal sequence, but in light of the Cross.

John Behr illustrates this distortion early in his book In Accordance with Scripture, particularly on page 2 and in Figure 1 of the chapter titled “Figuring Scripture.” There, he diagrams the modern tendency to treat the Bible as a continuous historical line, with Genesis at the beginning and the Gospels as its midpoint. The Church Fathers, however, did not read Scripture this way. For them, Christ was not merely the climax of the story—He was its origin and its meaning. They did not begin with Genesis and work forward to the Gospels. Rather, they began with the Cross and Resurrection, and only then turned back to Scripture to understand what had been revealed "according to the Scriptures."

This is the first and perhaps most foundational error in how we read: we mistake the Bible’s structure as temporal instead of theological. We begin with the wrong "beginning." For the Christian, the beginning of Scripture is not Genesis—it is Jesus Christ. Or, to put it more precisely, it is the crucified and risen Christ who opens the Scriptures to us. Only in Him is the veil lifted. As St. Paul writes, “when one turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away” (2 Cor 3:16). The Gospel of John gestures toward this very reality by re-narrating the creation story: “In the beginning was the Word,” not just to echo Genesis but to reveal its deeper logic. John does not give us a new creation account merely to parallel the old—he re-reads the old through the One who fulfills and reveals it.

This means that Scripture is not first and foremost a historical record; it is a theological witness. It is not a chronological documentation of divine acts leading up to Christ—it is a testimony to the rupture that the death and resurrection of Christ creates between God as He was known before, and how He is known now. It is a testimony to the power of the Spirit and of Christ—a testimony from within Christ, in whom all things hold together. To read it properly, then, is not to follow the timeline from Eden to Golgotha, but to stand at Golgotha, in the light of the Resurrection, and only then turn back to see how “beginning with Moses and all the prophets,” He was always there (Luke 24:27).

To insist on reading Genesis as the foundation of Scripture, rather than Christ, is not only a misreading—it is a subtle form of bibliolatry. It mistakes the text for the Truth, the narrative for the Logos. But Scripture, as the Fathers knew, is only truly Scripture when it is read in the light of Christ. Otherwise, we remain veiled, like those who read Moses without the Spirit.

We can see the consequences of this distorted approach in how Genesis 3—the account of the Fall—is so often read. When approached as the opening move in a linear narrative, it becomes the foundation for a juridical understanding of salvation: Adam sins, humanity is condemned, and Christ comes as a kind of divine legal workaround. But the Fathers did not read it this way. The story of the Fall was understood not as a legal proceeding, but as a figure or symbol of a greater (real) mystery unveiled by Christ. Only in light of the Cross do we perceive what sin truly is: a rupture of communion, not merely the breaking of a rule. And only in the Risen Christ does the meaning of death, exile, and the promise of life begin to shine through the veil of that ancient text. To read Genesis as if it can be rightly understood without Christ is not to honor Scripture—it is to cut it off from its fulfillment

2. Distorting the Relationship Between the Testaments

Flowing from the first error is a second: we misread the relationship between the Old and New Testaments. If we imagine Scripture as a chronological sequence, we are tempted to think of the Old Testament as a failed first attempt and the New as God’s corrective. The Old becomes the shadow, the negative, the problem to which Christ is merely the solution. We reduce the rich theological tapestry of the Old Testament to a kind of moral prologue or abstract legal framework whose sole purpose is to highlight the necessity of grace. But in doing so, we flatten the Scriptures and sever the unity of God’s self-revelation.

This misreading, too, is a product of approaching the Bible from the outside, as if one were reconstructing a story with a plot twist at the end, rather than entering into a mystery that reveals itself only from within. When Christ opens the Scriptures to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, He does not simply point out predictive verses scattered throughout the Old Testament. He opens the meaning of the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets—revealing that their entire structure, imagery, and drama were always oriented toward Him, though hidden beneath the veil. The New Testament does not replace the Old; it discloses it. The Cross does not merely fulfill prophecy—it transforms our very capacity to see what was there all along.

The Fathers understood this well. They read the Old Testament not merely as historical record but as a treasury of spiritual meaning. Gregory of Nyssa, in the introduction to his Commentary on the Song of Songs, defends the allegorical method by appealing directly to the Apostle Paul, who teaches that the events of Israel’s history “happened as types for us” (1 Cor. 10:6). On this basis, Gregory interprets Pharaoh, Egypt, the Red Sea, and the Promised Land not simply as past realities but as figures of the soul’s spiritual condition—its bondage to sin, its liberation by grace, its struggle toward purification, and its final rest in God. This is not an imaginative overlay on the text, but the very way the New Testament itself treats the Old.

From this allegorical grounding, the Fathers also practiced what would later be distinguished as anagogy: a reading that draws the soul upward toward participation in divine things. Allegory interprets the events as spiritual realities; anagogy ascends with them. It is not content with moral instruction or doctrinal correlation but seeks the soul’s transformation. Gregory’s Life of Moses is a clear example of this mode. He reads the historical ascent of Moses up Mount Sinai as the soul’s continual ascent into the mystery of God—an ascent with no final resting point, because the true knowledge of God is infinite. Here, the text does not simply tell us what to believe; it draws us into the mystery it discloses. Both allegory and anagogy, in patristic usage, are grounded in the conviction that Christ is the one who unveils Scripture, and that to read in Him is to encounter the truth hidden beneath the letter.

It is worthy to note that even those who offered a more literal reading of scripture more frequently like John Chrysostom still did it through the lens of the bountiful mercy of God going beyond the meaning simply indicated on the surface of the text, to a deeper meaning such in his reading for instance of the flood:

The fact, too, that he brought on the deluge for forty days and nights is a further wonderful sign of his loving kindness. His purpose in his great goodness was that at least some of them might come to their senses and escape that utter ruin, having before their eyes the annihilation of their peers and the destruction about to overwhelm them. I mean, the likelihood is that on the first day some proportion were drowned, an additional number on the second day, and likewise on the third day and so on. His reason for extending it for forty days was that he might remove from them any grounds for excuse. You see, had it been his wish and command, he could have submerged everything in one downpour. Instead, out of fidelity to his characteristic love he arranged for a stay of so many days.

To say here that the number of days of the flood was a “wonderful sign of his loving kindness,” and that his purpose was to make sure “that at least some of them might come to their senses and escape that utter ruin” is not at all indicated or implied by a surface level literal reading of the flood, but rather only understood by one who has encountered Christ and reads Christ’s revelation of God’s loving kindness back into the text.

3. Losing the Mode of Reading: From Participation to Purity

Even when the content of Scripture is rightly affirmed—when we say that Christ is its center, that the Old and New Testaments are one—there remains a deeper issue: the mode of reading. For Scripture is not merely a text to be analyzed or mastered. It is a divine mystery, and like all mysteries, it requires a particular kind of person to receive it. The early Church did not read Scripture as detached observers but as those being formed within the very life the text discloses. One must be spiritually reshaped to perceive its meaning.

This is why, as John Anthony McGuckin explains, the Fathers insisted on a principle of interpretive consonance. In The Path of Christianity: The First Thousand Years, he writes:

The principle of consonance… is extensively set out… in the first of the Five Theological Orations by St. Gregory the Theologian, who elsewhere throughout his work describes the biblical commentator as a priest who is allowed entry into a temple, but the deeper the progression into the sacred areas… the more pressing is the need for purity of heart and acumen of mind. Both things, moral and intellectual power, are seen by Gregory to be significant charisms that cannot be neglected, and if they are not present in the manifested works of the interpreter, the priestly act of biblical exegesis will be rendered into sacrilege (773–774.)

The act of interpretation, in other words, is not merely intellectual—it is ascetical. To read rightly, one must enter into the holiness of the thing being read. For Gregory, the Scripture is not a record of sacred things. It is a temple. And entry into that temple—especially into its deeper chambers—is not granted to the impure.

This was also the conviction of Origen, who insisted that interpretation depends on intimacy with Christ. In his view, only the one who becomes like the disciple whom Jesus loved—who leaned on Christ’s breast and stood at the foot of the Cross—can understand the Scriptures. The task of exegesis is not reserved for the skilled but for the sanctified. Only one who has undergone purification from the passions, and who has begun to be deified by grace, can perceive what lies beneath the veil of the text. As he writes, “One must become something divine to grasp divine things.”

Gregory of Nyssa echoes this vision. For him, the Scriptures are given to lead the soul upward. But that ascent cannot begin until the soul has turned away from the distorted passions that cloud its vision. In The Life of Moses, the historical journey of Moses becomes a figure of the soul’s continual movement into divine mystery—one that requires both illumination and transformation. Scripture’s ultimate aim is not to convey ideas, but to lead the reader into God.

What has been lost in the modern world is this posture of humility, purification, and participation. Literalism reduces the text to surface-level moral lessons. Historicism brackets faith entirely and replaces transformation with analysis. Both remove the reader from the mystery, positioning them as spectators rather than participants.

To recover the mode of reading is not merely to recover a method—it is to recover a life. The Fathers read as those being transfigured by the Word, not as those who mastered it. Scripture is not a static object to be dissected; it is a living voice, and it speaks most clearly to those whose lives have been conformed to the life of the One it reveals.

As St. Paul writes, “We have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16). And this mind—this phronema—is not one of cleverness or control. It is the mind of one who “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself… becoming obedient to the point of death” (Phil. 2:6–8). To interpret Scripture rightly is to take on this same mind: humble, self-emptying, given over entirely to the will of the Father for the life of the world. Only those who learn to read in this way—cruciformly, as it were—can begin to grasp what Scripture truly reveals.

4. Severing Theology from Scripture: From Living Encounter to Propositional Abstraction

All the distortions we have examined thus far—mistaking the order of Scripture, misreading the relationship between the Testaments, and losing the proper mode of reading—converge in one final, and perhaps most serious, error: the severing of theology from Scripture itself. For many today, theology has become a second-order activity, a set of systematic statements built on conclusions extracted from the biblical text. Scripture is reduced to a storehouse of doctrinal propositions, and theology becomes a rational superstructure built atop that textual foundation.

But the Bible was never meant to be read as a compendium of abstract truths. Its purpose is not to supply us with a catalog of divine attributes or metaphysical definitions. Scripture is not a system—it is a cosmos. As Maximus the Confessor writes, “the Word of God... made the world a Bible, just as he made the Bible a world” (Ambigua 10.1084A). That is to say, Scripture is not separate from the created order, nor from the Word through whom all things were made. It is a symbolic world, charged with the presence of Christ, and its purpose is not to inform us about God in the abstract, but to lead us into union with Him.

This symbolic structure of Scripture is what Irenaeus had in mind when he criticized the Gnostics for rearranging the text to fit their own vision. In Against Heresies, he writes that the Scriptures are like a mosaic composed of many small stones. These stones may be arranged truthfully—into the face of a King—or deceitfully, into the image of a fox. The difference between the two arrangements does not lie in the materials, but in the vision of the one assembling them. Only those who know the King—who recognize Him by name, having received the Spirit and entered into His Body, the Church—can rightly interpret the pieces and assemble the image that was always intended.

In this light, theology cannot precede spiritual knowledge. One must first know Christ—not in the sense of intellectual apprehension, but in the personal and ecclesial sense of being joined to Him. As Irenaeus says, the rule of faith is not derived from Scripture by analysis; it is the lens through which Scripture becomes intelligible. Theology is not the act of extracting meaning from a sacred text—it is the act of beholding the mosaic of the King, of recognizing His face, and then articulating what one has seen. It is the fruit of vision, not of deduction.

This is why the Fathers never approached Scripture apart from the Church, and never did theology apart from the life of prayer and participation in the mysteries. The one who speaks about God without having come to know God through the life of Christ in the Spirit is like one rearranging stones with no knowledge of the face they are meant to reveal. The text may be handled with skill—but the image formed will be false.

To reunite theology and Scripture, then, is not merely to use more Bible verses in theological writing. It is to recover the symbolic cosmos of Scripture as a living, sacramental reality. It is to return to the condition of recognition—to the eyes of the heart opened by the Spirit to see in the text the face of the Crucified and Risen Lord. And only from this vision can theology begin.

Conclusion: Returning to the Living Word

We began with a provocative claim: that we no longer know how to read Scripture. Along the way, we have seen that this loss is not merely technical or academic, but spiritual. We have misunderstood the nature of the text—reading it in sequence rather than from the light of the Cross. We have distorted the relationship between the Testaments—treating the Old as obsolete rather than unveiled in Christ. We have lost the mode of reading—approaching the Scriptures not with the mind of Christ, but with the posture of control, analysis, or detachment. And we have severed theology from the living mystery of the text—treating it as a source of propositions rather than as a symbolic cosmos whose meaning is disclosed only to those who know the King.

To recover Scripture is not first to adopt new methods but to undergo a change of mind—a metanoia. We must return to the phronema of the Church, to the Spirit who opens the Scriptures to reveal Christ, and to the posture of those who read not to master the text, but to be mastered by the Word it reveals. The Bible is not a closed book. It is a living temple, and it opens itself only to those who enter through humility, obedience, and love. We must learn again to read not merely about Christ, but in Him—and to do so as members of His Body, in whom the true image of the King is restored.

Only then can Scripture become what it was always meant to be: the place where God speaks, and where we learn again not just to understand, but to see.