July 18, 2026
Wisdom Lit:
A Short Course in Reading Scripture
I have known a few people who decided, for various reasons, to read the Bible straight through. None of them finished – or even got very far. The stories in Genesis cook right along, about half of Exodus too. But the next three and a half books inevitably drag them to a halt. There is simply no payoff in slogging through the interminable lists of laws and rituals defining Israel’s obligations in their covenant with God. Thus these hapless readers never get far enough to encounter the frustrating inconsistencies and fantastical tales that might prompt the real reckoning: that is, that reading sacred texts is unlike reading anything else.
Nor, for that matter, is there a single standard approach for scripture study from one religion to another, or even from one historical period to another within a single tradition. And the texts themselves, the vast majority of them, are compilations of oral stories and sayings assembled by sometimes one but more often many interpreters. Few represent a single period of history, but even when they do, their recorders often do not.
Such complex pedigrees should suggest a number of interpretive questions that are nonetheless largely overlooked by the lay reader, a problem that is compounded when scripture is read solely from the ground of
contemporary values. Late in his career, process theologian John Cobb warned that the failure to read scripture historically results in an absolutizing of church and dogma that is nothing less than idolatry, and can lead to all kinds of confusion and even abuse. Further, it is “crazy,” he maintained, to insist on the literal content of the legends contained in one’s own scriptures but deny legitimacy to the legends of other traditions.
All of which points to the greater issue lurking within the sacred texts: From where do these melting pots of wisdom secure their authority? Divine inspiration is of course the movement to which every sacred tradition would point, but much depends on just how one conceives its mechanism. The Christian line that considers each word the inerrant product of divine revelation, somehow planted in or dictated to its authors, is actually a minority position among the world’s religions, and upon deeper reflection, perhaps not a very sophisticated one.
A once-for-all text containing literal stories and absolute meanings may serve the one who seeks the security of final rules and answers. But what of the one who seeks to grow?
Texts of Transformation
One critical recognition might have spared humankind ages of religious haggling: that the scriptures on which each faith relies have growth baked into them. The revelation of truth that is claimed for the Vedas and the Gita and the Dhammapada, as well as the Torah and the Koran and the Gospels, is no more and no less than the record of humankind’s many-storied journey to know Ultimate Reality by whatever name it is called.
The grasp of this dynamic nature of sacred texts has, however, been uneven. The great religious traditions of Asia lay claim to sacred texts at least as ancient as those of the Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – but their relationship with their wisdom literature has escaped the doctrinal absolutism of the “religions of the book.” Instead of a single definitive volume, both Hinduism and Buddhism have access to a massive number of texts and commentaries produced over history by sages too numerous to count. While each tradition has coalesced around key precepts or teachings, every new generation is free and encouraged to roam through centuries’ worth of expression to bring them into the light of their own experience, retrieving what is of eternal value from the vessels of myth and magic in which they were originally cast. There is a fluidity, a mutual conversation in which nothing is final and new openings are perpetually discovered.
Moreover, for both Hindu and Buddhist, the goal of direct experience of the divine positions scripture as a tool for its realization rather than an end in itself. Therefore both lineages will salute insight wherever it is found. “Truth is one, but the wise call it by many names.” Just as pilgrims are many and diverse, so too are the paths to the summit. Each tradition’s scriptures will carry a particular weight with their respective followers, to be sure, offering cosmological frameworks, philosophical meditations, and moral guidance, but each also grants a genuine respect to the wisdom expressed in the scriptures of every other group. In the human journey toward understanding, all are welcome to contribute.
Christianity, on the other hand, has hung its identity on a single story, one that begins in the ancient Jewish history and culminates in the person of the Christ. It has maintained a single revelation at work in the entire continuum, from creation through Abraham and the prophets to Jesus. To the challenge – sometimes chagrin – of scholars, however, the story line refuses to fall smoothly into place. Much theological ink has been spilled in the effort to reconcile the angry judgmental God of the Old Testament with the supremely loving God of the New, or to wrest an identification of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah from texts whose authors intended something very different.
Christianity has come a long way in the last century in its regard for other faiths and their formative scriptures. It will be well served to adopt these traditions’ understanding of the birth of sacred texts as well. For the wisdom texts of all paths consist not in an absolute once-for-all definition of truth, but as records of the universal journey of transformation from a more primitive intuition of the divine Source of life toward a ripening of its encounter with it. Thankfully, this has, at least in some branches of Christianity, gained some ground. Where Judaism and Islam have remained more firmly tied to fixed meanings of their texts, new tools and ways of studying the Bible have encouraged some Chrisitan theologians to turn to a more vital and evolving context for faith. More, in fact, like what was held to very early on.
In the days and years after Jesus, stories about him and his teaching circulated by mouth. There was a genius in this oral transmission, for as the fledgling movement joined remembrance of his earthly presence with the force of his spirit still among them, wisdom was crafted in the intimacy of experience. It had room to grow and mature with those who carried it, over time coming together in a shared set of beliefs and practices. Perhaps it was inevitable that in a church that was rapidly becoming defined by its missionary objectives, a definitive text was finally desired; an ordered message was required, and a final canon was gathered.
Yet even then – and for a long time – its purveyors did not present the Bible’s substance as a single and settled argument. Teachers and preachers in the early centuries, and in the Roman Catholic Church even today, held up a somewhat more reflective assimilation of the sacred text. Its fourfold pedagogy offers a fuller and deeper access to the truths beyond language than a literal reading of its discourse can hope to convey. In addition to a literal reading that carefully takes in the historical period, the culture, and the author’s intent in the book’s creation, the reader simultaneously engages a symbolic meaning that rolls from the stories and their teaching into a personal application of the salvation journey. The moral sense examines the story for examples of how to live righteously and act justly. And finally, an anagogical perception reaches toward the eternal, with earthly images standing in for heaven and the afterlife. Engaged sequentially, meaning is layered into a road that leads beyond the words.
We may thank 16th-century priest Ignatius of Loyola for inching this paradigm in the direction of the direct and maturing interaction with scripture favored by the East. His brilliant little volume, The Spiritual Exercises, designed as a manual to be used over a month-long intensive retreat, sought to nurture an encounter of the entire person with the divine at the center of the biblical texts. Still respecting all four dimensions of the earlier interpretive method, it urged the reader to place oneself right in the center of the story, in the company of Jesus – or the prophet or psalmist – enlivening not just the intellect, but the physical senses and the emotions by which humankind knows the world. Sometimes referred to as a spiritual “boot camp” under the direction of a guide, the exercises engender a virtual walk alongside those present at the key moments of faith’s journey.
Ignatius’s model was a whispered beginning to the kind of maturation nurtured by other spiritual systems. But though those who undertake the exercises today may indeed find room to incorporate a more progressive perspective on the evolution of scripture itself, its first users nonetheless sought a more profound understanding of a single orthodox teaching. The tools were there: to ingest the text, to sit with it, to wait for it to open itself – a discipline that requests the same time, focus, and surrender of the Hindu adept or the Buddhist yogi. But alas, in the days when most people could not read, and the Church would not have trusted them to if they could, the priest as guide would incline the retreatant toward simply a greater integration of interpretations already established by the Church. Ignatius’s time was a dark period in the Church’s story, with much abuse and superstition, and Martin Luther was right to come along with his reforms. But Luther threw out the baby with the bath, eliminating all but the most literal and historical interpretations and thrusting the Bible into the hands of a laity ill-equipped to plumb the magnitude of its mysteries. Further growth in the access to scripture was stymied by inter-denominational squabbles over doctrine that followed ever after.
That has begun to change, if slowly. The recovery of Christianity’s contemplative roots has gained much through fertilization from the East. From the fecund conversations of Buddhists, Hindus and Christians have emerged some new and elegant invitations to the most precious writings of our human cultures.
Reading the Divine
It begins with trust of self – not an easy step. That we are dealing with matters of ultimate concern mandates the fitting of guardrails. Our step outside the confines of dogmatic interpretation does not give us free rein; we do not have permission to disregard the work of those who have come before. We have new tools of scholarship, a better grasp of the historical and sociological and psychological contributions to the creation and interpretation of these texts, but the knowledge as well of the hopes and fears of the generations who have found counsel in them will help us to remain mindful of our own, and they have much to teach us. Yet neither need we grant them or their official guardians an unyielding authority. If the claim that we are made in the image of God means anything, it must surely describe an authentic ground for mutual understanding within all carriers of it. Our first step in the direction of contemplating scripture must be a faith in our capacity to receive it.
Paradoxically, our next step must take us into the territory of unknowing, of dropping our preconceptions and expectations, and letting go of our limited agendas. With the patience that is essential for truth to speak, we settle our attention in the mind of the heart, the organ that fathoms what the intellect alone cannot. First taught in the texts of the Upanishads and found in the contemplative practices of all traditions, this mind-heart pairing was the spiritual food of the earliest Christian monks, those stalwart men and women who fled to the Egyptian desert in the 3rd century. In committing large parts of the Bible to memory and repeating them over and over in their minds as they went about daily tasks, their aim was that every moment would be lived within the ground to which the scriptures pointed. Their discipline joins them to seekers of every age and every persuasion who have learned that there is no instant wisdom; one must live in its precincts.
But we are not monks, of course; our time with scripture will require a different shape. A method is helpful, at least to begin. A very effective one evolved from the ranks of those who followed in the footsteps of those early solitaries. In the 12th century, a French monk penned a brief manual for his fellow monastics, and its rediscovery and translation in the 1970s rapidly brought it to the center of the renewed contemplative movement in the West. Known by its Latin term, lectio divina – or divine reading – it is now a revered and principal element in contemporary Christian contemplative practice.
Lectio divina consists, like the earlier schema, of four steps, and as with its predecessor, with faithful repetition the steps begin to flow into one another. The first step is lectio, simply reading the passage slowly, ideally out loud to create a more conscious meeting with the text, and listening for a word or phrase that resonates with spirit. Then the passage is read a second time for meditatio, to linger over that word or phrase and allow it to draw in personal thoughts, memories, insights, to listen for the truth that is trying to name itself. The third gentle reading will move into oratio, a response to the text and to its divine wellspring, a natural and honest prayer of joy, sorrow, confession or plea, whatever the heart speaks. And finally comes contemplatio, resting in a wordless silence that nevertheless holds the text in its intent, to simply be with its wisdom both known and always still unexhausted.
Poised in Grace
It is a delicate balance, this reading of scripture, from whichever text and tradition one enters. Without some grounding in the historical and cultural soil of the writing, confusion and misunderstanding are inevitable, but the pull of the roots and the weight of tradition may keep insight from its destined flight. And it is wise to issue an invitation to texts from other traditions from a firm foundation in one’s own. Yet if one comes to any sacred text with reverence and a touch of awe, if one resists settling for a single message but returns again and again to its unique idiom, it will feed for a lifetime.
Many of the sacred texts from around the world are dotted with poetry; some are written almost completely in verse. And that may be a clue to what is too often missing in the West’s approach to the sacred. It will not release itself to the analytical, only to the imaginative. Scripture’s gifts are not bestowed on the one who reaches in to seize, but on the one who will nestle within it.
Christian Zen teacher Fr. William Johnston has suggested that we read these dispatches from the divine as the Zen student ponders the koan, not for “what they mean,” but for “what they do to us.” In the end, that may be all the instruction we need.
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