A first one is this: always be critically attentive to the variety of genres on display in the Scriptures. The Bible is not so much a book as a library, a collection of books. One of the standard questions posed by inquirers today is whether the Bible should be taken literally. In a way, it’s as pointless a question as whether one should take the library literally. It depends, of course, on which section you’re in! If you find a book on a history shelf, you might indeed read it straightforwardly, but if you take a book off a poetry shelf or from the fiction department, you would be foolish to read either text literally. If in your wanderings through the library, you come across Richard Ellmann’s celebrated biography of James Joyce, you would read it through entirely different lenses than you would to decipher Joyce’s own Finnegans Wake. The library that is the Bible contains seventy-three books, written by a wide variety of different authors, addressed to various audiences at differing moments in history, concerning a myriad of themes, and employing a plethora of literary genres. Readily identifiable within the biblical corpus are legend, saga, tall tale, history, poetry, song, prophecy, biography, epistolary literature, and apocalypse, and each of these literary types requires a particular kind of interpretive approach. Very often, both critics and advocates of the Bible look for a univocal answer to the question of scriptural interpretation: it’s all history; it’s all mythology; it’s all spiritual poetry; etc. But these easy answers are counterindicated. To give one example of the utility of attending to genre: much of the confusion—largely generated by various forms of twentieth-century fundamentalism—regarding the “scientific” interpretation of the first three chapters of the book of Genesis could be avoided by attending to the kind of literature we are dealing with in those astonishing passages. The four Gospels, too, call for their own distinct approach. While they are indeed historical accounts of a real person bearing a remarkable consensus in essentials, each Evangelist is focused on particular theological insights and interests, and they differ on certain secondary details such as chronology. We should not expect them to give us history in the modern journalistic sense, but rather four unique and stylized portraits of the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, handed down by the people who knew him.

Having clarified that the Bible is, in one sense, a library of books, I would also stress—and this constitutes the second interpretive strategy—that Scripture is, in another sense, one book. When I was coming of age in the university and seminary, the dominant form of scriptural analysis was the so-called historical-critical method. The stated purpose of this mode of interpretation is to use a variety of tools—linguistic, historical, archaeological, etc.—to determine the intentions of the human authors of the various biblical books. In other words, what was in the mind of Jeremiah or Isaiah or the author of 2 Samuel as he addressed his audience? There are virtues to this approach, to be sure, and a sound scriptural interpreter should never set it aside completely. But the historical-critical method also carries with it a shadow—namely, the tendency to lose the forest for the trees. As the historical critic focuses in on the intentions of the various authors writing to their disparate audiences at different historical moments, he can lose sight of the overall purpose of the Bible considered as a totality. He can overlook the fact that, despite all of its sometimes disconcerting variety, the Bible is finally telling one great story, or perhaps better, unfolding one great drama. This theo-dramatic consciousness makes the interpreter attentive to the themes, patterns, rhymes, and trajectories contained within the entire Bible. When, for example, the Church Fathers saw deep correspondences between Old Testament anticipations and New Testament fulfillments—what they called “types and antitypes”—they were operating out of this hermeneutical framework. Hans Urs von Balthasar taught that in a truly great work of art, each section of the whole relates harmonically to every other section and to the totality of the work. Think for example of the relationship between the parts and the whole in the Parthenon or in Chartres Cathedral or in Dante’s Divine Comedy. The same dynamic obtains, Balthasar argued, within the Bible, every book of which speaks in some sense to every other and contributes to the sweep of the story as a whole.