Reading Scripture: The Classic Anglican Way
God has given us everything we need to know His word.
There’s a peculiar anxiety that haunts modern Christians when they open the Bible. On one side stand those who turn Scripture into an unyielding legal code, wielding it as a weapon rather than receiving it as bread. On the other side are those who dissolve the text into pure symbol, where nothing quite means what it says and everything means whatever feels right to you.
Both approaches leave people stranded. The first makes Scripture brittle and sharp, impossible to live with. The second makes it so soft and pliable that it can’t bear any weight at all. Neither offers what most of us desperately need: a way to read the Bible that honors both its divine authority and receives its clear teaching, that takes it seriously by taking it plainly.
This is where the Anglican way of reading Scripture offers something rare and precious: a path that trusts the clarity of God’s word while remaining humble about our own understanding, a method both ancient and alive.
Scripture as Primary
Let me be clear from the start: Anglicans love the Bible. We don’t approach it casually or treat it as one voice among many equals. Scripture holds a unique and primary place in our faith. It is, as the Reformers said, the place where we most reliably encounter the Word of God. Every Anglican service is soaked in Scripture—we read it, sing it, pray it, preach it. Our liturgy is woven through with the language of the Psalms and the Prophets, the Gospels and the Epistles.
When Anglicans affirm that Scripture contains “all things necessary for salvation,” we mean it. The great truths of the faith—the nature of God, the person of Christ, the way of redemption, the hope of resurrection—these are found in the pages of the Bible. We don’t need secret knowledge or additional revelations. The shepherds and the scholars, the fishermen and the philosophers, all have access to the same saving truth.
And here’s what Anglicans have always believed: Scripture is fundamentally clear about what matters most. The gospel isn’t hidden in obscure codes. The way of salvation doesn’t require advanced degrees or secret interpretations. A child can understand that Jesus loves them and died for their sins. An elderly farmer can grasp that God created the world and calls us to love our neighbor. The essential message of Scripture is plain to those who read it with honest hearts.
But Scripture is also a library, not a single book. It contains history and poetry, prophecy and parable, apocalyptic visions and intimate letters. The same Holy Spirit who inspired the writing of Scripture also gave us minds to recognize what kind of text we’re reading. To read the poetry of the Psalms the same way we read the historical narrative of Acts is to misunderstand both. To read a parable of Jesus the same way we read a letter from Paul is to miss what each is doing.
This isn’t complicated. We do this naturally with every other kind of writing we encounter. When we read “my love is like a red, red rose,” we don’t picture someone dating a flower. When Jesus says “I am the door,” we don’t imagine him with hinges. Common sense tells us to read poetry as poetry and history as history. The Anglican approach simply applies this same common sense to Scripture, trusting that God communicated in ways humans actually communicate.
The Witness of the Earliest Interpreters
One of the great questions that emerged from the Reformation was this: If everyone can read the Bible for themselves, how do we know we’re reading it rightly? What keeps us from just making it say whatever we want?
This is where the Early Church Fathers become indispensable. And I mean this quite literally—we cannot safely read Scripture without them.
Think about what the Fathers represent. These were men who lived within a few generations of the apostles themselves. Many were taught by those who had known the apostles personally. Polycarp sat at the feet of John. Irenaeus learned from Polycarp. Clement of Rome likely knew Peter and Paul. When Ignatius of Antioch wrote about the Eucharist or Irenaeus explained a passage from John’s Gospel, they weren’t speculating from a distance of centuries—they were passing on what had been received in living memory from those who walked with Jesus.
The Fathers also had something we lack: they were native speakers of the languages in which Scripture was written and first read. When Chrysostom preached on Paul’s letters, he wasn’t working through translations and centuries of linguistic change. He heard the Greek the way Paul’s original hearers heard it, caught the nuances and wordplay, understood the cultural references immediately. When Augustine wrestled with the Psalms, he brought to them a rhetorical training that made him sensitive to every shift in tone and structure. These men inhabited the world of the text in ways we cannot.
But perhaps most importantly, the Fathers paid for their faith with their lives. Many were martyred. Others endured exile, persecution, the loss of everything they had. When Athanasius defended the divinity of Christ against the Arians, he wasn’t engaging in abstract theological speculation—he was standing firm on what the church had always believed, even when it cost him his bishopric five times over. When the Fathers interpret Scripture, they do so as men who loved it enough to die for it. Their readings aren’t the casual opinions of distant academics, but convictions forged in suffering and sealed in blood.
This gives the patristic witness an authority that no modern interpreter—however learned, however sincere—can match. The Fathers stand between us and the apostles as a bridge across time, showing us how the apostolic church itself understood the texts that would become our New Testament, and how those texts illuminated the Old.
How the Fathers Read Scripture
Here’s what’s remarkable: when you read the Fathers, you discover that they protect us from both the errors that plague modern interpretation.
Against wooden literalism, the Fathers read Scripture with profound sensitivity to its literary variety and spiritual depth. They understood that the Bible communicates on multiple levels. Take Origen’s treatment of the crossing of the Red Sea. Yes, it was a historical event—the Fathers weren’t modern skeptics. But it was also a type, a foreshadowing of baptism, where we pass through water from slavery to freedom, from death to life. Or consider how Augustine read the Psalms, seeing in David’s words both their original historical context and their deeper fulfillment in Christ, who truly embodies both the suffering and the vindication the psalmist describes.
The Fathers taught the church to read typologically—to see how the Old Testament prepares for and points toward Christ. Isaac carrying the wood for his own sacrifice prefigures Christ carrying the cross. The bronze serpent lifted up in the wilderness anticipates Christ lifted up for our healing. Jonah’s three days in the belly of the fish foreshadow the resurrection. This isn’t imposing foreign meanings on the text—Jesus himself taught the disciples to read this way on the road to Emmaus, showing them how all the Scriptures spoke of him.
At the same time, the Fathers were not endlessly flexible in their interpretations. They maintained clear boundaries. When Marcion tried to reject the Old Testament entirely, Irenaeus refuted him by showing the unity of Scripture’s witness to one God. When the Gnostics claimed secret knowledge that contradicted the plain apostolic teaching, the Fathers pointed back to the “rule of faith”—the core gospel message that had been publicly proclaimed and received from the beginning. When Arius tried to make Christ a creature rather than God, Athanasius demonstrated from Scripture after Scripture that the church had always worshiped Jesus as Lord, as Thomas did when he confessed “My Lord and my God.”
The patristic consensus, in other words, is not restrictive but liberating. It frees us from having to reinvent the wheel, from falling into errors that have already been thoroughly examined and rejected, from the anxiety of thinking we must decode everything alone.
Consider a specific example: How did the Fathers read John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”? They saw in it an unambiguous declaration of Christ’s divinity—that the Word who became flesh in Jesus is himself fully God, distinct from the Father (with God) yet sharing the same divine nature (was God). When Arius suggested that “the Word was God” meant something less than full deity, the Fathers showed how this contradicted not only John’s clear statement but the entire scriptural witness to Christ’s identity. Their reading wasn’t clever innovation—it was faithful reception of what the text plainly says and what the church had always believed.
Or take the question of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. From the earliest generations, the Fathers spoke of the bread and wine as truly becoming Christ’s body and blood. Ignatius of Antioch, writing around 110 AD, called the Eucharist “the medicine of immortality” and “the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ.” Justin Martyr explained that the bread and wine are “the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.” Irenaeus argued against the Gnostics that the Eucharist proves the goodness of creation—the same God who made wheat and grapes uses them to convey Christ to us. Whatever our disagreements about the precise mechanism, the Fathers are unanimous: Christ is truly present, we truly receive him, grace is truly given.
This patristic witness saves us from two opposite errors. It prevents us from reducing the Eucharist to mere symbolism (which no Father taught) and from insisting on philosophical explanations that go beyond what Scripture reveals (which the Fathers often held more lightly). The Fathers show us what must be believed and where we have liberty.
Tradition as the Faithful Consensus
When Anglicans speak of tradition, we mean something specific: the faithful consensus of the church across the centuries, rooted in the apostolic faith, tested by time, proved through persecution.
This is what the fifth-century monk Vincent of Lérins captured in what we now call the Vincentian Canon: we hold to “what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.” This isn’t an impossible standard—it’s simply a test of humility. If you think you’ve discovered a meaning in Scripture that no faithful Christian in any century or continent has ever seen before, you’re probably wrong. The Holy Spirit has been at work in the church for a very long time, and the Holy Spirit does not contradict himself.
Think of the great creeds—the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed. These aren’t additions to Scripture. They’re summaries of what Scripture plainly teaches about God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; creation, incarnation, resurrection. When we confess these creeds, we’re standing with millions of Christians across the ages, reading the Bible the way the Fathers read it, the way it has always been read by the faithful.
The creeds emerged from controversy, yes, but the controversies simply forced the church to articulate clearly what had always been believed. When Arius denied Christ’s full divinity, the Council of Nicaea didn’t invent a new doctrine—it confessed the faith the church had received from the apostles and guarded ever since. The Greek word “homoousios” (of the same substance) was new, but the truth it expressed was ancient: Jesus Christ is Lord, true God from true God.
Or consider how the church has always read the moral law of Scripture. The Ten Commandments aren’t obscure. “You shall not murder” is clear. “You shall not commit adultery” is plain. “Honor your father and mother” doesn’t require decoding. The church across all times and places has read these commands and understood them to mean what they say. From the Didache in the first century through the Fathers, the medieval doctors, the Reformers, and faithful Christians today—the moral law stands firm.
This is the Anglican genius: we’re not isolated individuals trying to figure everything out for ourselves. We read Scripture in the company of Athanasius and Augustine, Chrysostom and Cyril, Gregory and Jerome. We read knowing that the church has been reading these same texts for two thousand years, and the constant witness of the faithful across that span gives us confidence that we’re hearing God’s voice rightly.
But—and this is crucial—tradition is a guide, not a replacement for Scripture. When tradition and Scripture come into tension, Scripture wins. This is why the English Reformers could challenge certain medieval practices that had no biblical warrant—like the selling of indulgences or prayers to saints not grounded in apostolic teaching—while still honoring the ancient creeds and the wisdom of the early church. They were simply insisting that Scripture be allowed to speak clearly, that we return to how the Fathers read it, without layers of later accretions obscuring its plain meaning.
The Fathers themselves insisted on this. When Augustine debated the Donatists, he didn’t simply appeal to tradition—he showed from Scripture why they were wrong. When Athanasius defended orthodoxy, he marshaled text after text, demonstrating that his reading aligned with the whole counsel of God’s word. The Fathers were traditionalists precisely because they were first and foremost students of Scripture.
Reason as Companion
God gave us minds, and he expects us to use them.
This is what Anglicans mean by “reason”—not that we sit in judgment over Scripture, but that we read it thoughtfully. We pay attention to context. We notice what kind of literature we’re reading. We learn from history and language and the study of the world God made.
The Fathers themselves were masters of reason applied to Scripture. Jerome learned Hebrew so he could translate the Old Testament more accurately. Augustine brought all his rhetorical training to bear on understanding Paul’s arguments. The Cappadocian Fathers (Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa) engaged deeply with Greek philosophy—not to replace Scripture, but to defend it, to show how the gospel answered questions the philosophers had been asking for centuries.
Reason helps us understand that when Jesus speaks in parables, he’s teaching through stories, not giving us literal descriptions. This isn’t complicated. It’s how we read everything. When your grandmother writes “I’m tickled pink,” you don’t worry about her skin color. When a letter says “greet one another with a holy kiss,” we understand that the principle (greet each other warmly in ways appropriate to your culture) matters more than the specific first-century expression of it.
But reason does something else too: it helps us live out Scripture’s clear commands in new situations. The Bible doesn’t mention cars, but we can apply “love your neighbor” to how we drive. The Bible doesn’t discuss the internet, but its wisdom about truth-telling and sexual purity applies perfectly well to online life. We’re not adding to Scripture; we’re simply asking what Scripture’s plain teaching means for us today.
Reason is not an alternative authority to Scripture. It’s a tool for understanding what Scripture clearly says and how to apply it faithfully. It’s the common sense God gave us to read his word the way he intended it to be read—which is exactly how the Fathers read it, with all the intellectual resources available to them.
The Three-Fold Cord
Scripture, tradition, and reason—these three work together, each supporting and checking the others.
Scripture is primary, the supreme authority, containing all things necessary for salvation. But we read Scripture guided by the faithful consensus of the church, especially the witness of the Fathers who stand closest to the apostolic age. And we read it using the minds God gave us, paying attention to context, genre, and the way God actually communicates with human beings.
This isn’t three equal sources of authority competing with each other. It’s one coherent way of reading, where Scripture speaks with primary authority, tradition shows us how Scripture has always been faithfully read, and reason helps us understand and apply what Scripture plainly says.
Think of it like a three-fold cord that is not easily broken. Scripture alone can be twisted to say almost anything—as the devil himself demonstrated when tempting Jesus in the wilderness by quoting Psalms out of context. Tradition alone can calcify into empty ritual disconnected from God’s living word. Reason alone becomes mere human philosophy, unable to save. But together—Scripture interpreted in light of the church’s faithful witness and read with the minds God gave us—we have a stable, trustworthy way forward.
The Fathers show us this harmony in action. They revered Scripture as God’s word. They passed on what they had received from those before them. And they thought deeply, carefully, bringing all their learning to bear on understanding divine truth. We simply follow in their footsteps.
Avoiding the Extremes
This approach saves us from two deadly errors.
The first error is a kind of wooden reading that misses the forest for the trees. This approach sounds pious—”I just believe what the Bible says!”—but it often misses what the Bible is actually saying. It treats poetry like prose, ignores context, and ends up with interpretations that even common sense rejects. I’ve heard this approach described as taking the Scriptures so literally that they are not really taken seriously.
Jesus said “I am the vine.” He said “I am the door.” He said “If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.” A wooden approach either takes these as literal statements (which leads to absurdity) or has to start making exceptions and qualifications (which undermines the whole method). The Anglican approach, learned from the Fathers, simply recognizes that Jesus when teaching or using parables used metaphor, hyperbole, and vivid imagery to make his point. Reading Scripture plainly means reading it the way it was meant to be read.
The Fathers never fell into this trap. They knew that “God is spirit” and therefore references to God’s “hand” or “face” are anthropomorphisms—ways of speaking about God that accommodate our human limitations. They understood that the Song of Songs, while celebrating marital love, also speaks of Christ’s love for his church. They read with sophistication because they trusted that God communicates with sophistication.
The second error is treating Scripture as endlessly flexible, where nothing quite means what it seems to mean and every clear command can be reinterpreted away. This approach sounds sophisticated, but it leaves us with no word from God at all. If “you shall not steal” doesn’t really mean don’t steal, if “love your neighbor” doesn’t really mean love your neighbor, if the resurrection isn’t really a resurrection, then we have no gospel, no hope, and no reason to read the Bible in the first place.
The Fathers faced this error too, in the form of Gnostic allegorizers who spiritualized away the incarnation, the resurrection, even the goodness of creation itself. The church’s response was firm: yes, Scripture has spiritual meanings, but these build on, rather than replace, the literal and historical. Christ was really born of a virgin, really crucified under Pontius Pilate, really rose bodily from the dead. These aren’t symbols—they’re historical events with cosmic significance.
The Anglican way, following the Fathers, threads between these extremes. We read Scripture plainly, trusting that God meant to communicate clearly. But we read it thoughtfully, recognizing the different kinds of literature, the different contexts, the difference between timeless truth and time-bound application.
When Scripture speaks clearly—and it usually does—we receive what it says. God created the world. Humanity fell into sin. Jesus Christ died for our sins and rose from the dead. We are saved by grace through faith. We are called to love God and neighbor. These truths aren’t hidden or obscure. They’re the plain teaching of Scripture, believed by Christians everywhere and always, confessed by the Fathers, sealed by the martyrs.
The Reward
This way of reading Scripture does something vital: it gives people confidence in God’s word without requiring them to turn off their brains, and offers the time-tested wisdom of the church to lead the way.
You don’t need a seminary degree to understand the gospel. You don’t need to master Greek and Hebrew to know what God requires of you. You don’t need a priest or scholar to explain every verse before you can trust it. The central message of Scripture is wonderfully, gloriously clear—and the Fathers confirm this again and again.
At the same time, this approach respects both the proven interpretations of those who stood closest to the apostolic age and the intelligence God gave you. You can ask questions. You can notice when you’re reading poetry versus history. You can think about how a first-century command applies in a twenty-first-century context. None of this is rebellious or faithless—it’s simply reading Scripture the way the Fathers did, the way God intended.
Consider the person struggling with doubt. The rigid approach tells them to ignore their questions and just believe harder. The loose approach tells them nothing is certain anyway, so believe whatever feels right. But the Anglican approach says: Ask your questions. Many of them have good answers—the Fathers wrestled with similar questions and their responses still speak today. Some mysteries will remain, and that’s okay—even the great doctors of the church confessed that we see through a glass darkly. But the core truths—that God loves you, that Christ died for you, that you can trust his promises—these stand firm, clear and sure, witnessed by Scripture and confirmed by two thousand years of faithful consensus.
Or think of the new believer trying to read the Bible. They come to Leviticus and get confused about dietary laws and skin diseases. The wooden approach insists every command applies equally to all times or cites exceptions (leading to impossible contradictions either way). The loose approach says it’s all just ancient customs we can ignore (emptying Scripture of authority). But the Anglican approach, learned from the Fathers, helps them see: some laws were specific to Israel’s unique situation, preparing the way for Christ. The moral law (love God, love neighbor, pursue holiness) remains. Christ himself showed us how to read the Old Testament rightly—not discarding it, but fulfilling it. And the Fathers—Irenaeus, Chrysostom, Augustine—demonstrated this reading in text after text, showing how the Law and the Prophets find their meaning in the gospel.
This way of reading the Bible makes faith possible for honest, thoughtful people who want to take God’s word seriously without pretending it’s something it’s not. It connects us to the great cloud of witnesses who have gone before, roots us in apostolic faith, and gives us confidence that we’re not inventing a new Christianity but receiving the old gospel, the faith once delivered to the saints.
A Living Word for a Living World
Scripture is living and active, the writer of Hebrews tells us, sharper than any two-edged sword. Living and active—not dead and static. The words on the page are ancient, yes, but the Word they convey is eternally present, eternally speaking, eternally able to meet us exactly where we are.
Classic Anglicans read Scripture as people who trust its clarity and authority. We believe God is powerful enough to communicate clearly and that he has done so in the Bible. We don’t need to make Scripture complicated. We don’t need layers of interpretation to get to its “real” meaning. Most of the time, Scripture means what it says, and says what it means. The Fathers teach us this confidence.
But we also read as people who trust God’s goodness in how he gave us Scripture. He gave it to us in human language, using human literary forms, addressing real people in real situations. He expects us to read it as the kind of book it is—not as a magic text where every word carries equal weight and every sentence functions the same way, but as his word to us, clear where it needs to be clear, sometimes mysterious, always true.
Think of how Jesus himself read Scripture. He could see the deeper meanings, the ways the Old Testament pointed to him. But he also read it plainly: “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone.’” “Have you not read what was spoken to you by God?” He expected his hearers to understand Scripture’s clear teaching. At the same time, he opened up unexpected depths: “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me.”
Or consider Paul’s approach to Scripture. He quotes it extensively, treats it as authoritative, builds his arguments on its plain meaning. But he also sees how the old covenant points forward to the new, how promises made to Israel find their fulfillment in Christ, how the law that once condemned now serves a different purpose for those in Christ. He doesn’t make Scripture say whatever he wants. He reads it in light of the gospel event—the death and resurrection of Jesus—which is itself the clearest word God has ever spoken.
The Fathers learned to read this way from the apostles themselves, and they passed it on to us. When we read Scripture in the Anglican way, we’re joining a conversation that stretches back to the upper room, to the road to Emmaus, to the moment when the risen Christ opened the disciples’ minds to understand the Scriptures.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, John wrote, full of grace and truth. Grace and truth, held together. Not grace without truth, which is sentimentality. Not truth without grace, which is cruelty. Both, always both, in the person of Jesus and in the Scripture that bears witness to him.
This is how we read the Bible: trusting its clarity, submitting to its authority, reading it thoughtfully in community with the church across the ages, especially those earliest witnesses who stood closest to the apostolic age. We read with gratitude for the Fathers who preserved the faith through persecution and heresy. We read with hope for those who will come after. We read knowing we see through a glass darkly, but trusting that one day we will see face to face.
Until then, we keep reading. We keep listening. We keep letting these ancient words shape us into the people God is calling us to be. Not as isolated interpreters, each discovering our own private meaning, but as the church—the body of Christ, reading the word of Christ, by the Spirit of Christ, guided by those who first received it, for the life of the world.
The Bible is not a puzzle requiring expert decoding. It is bread for the journey, light for the path, a lamp to our feet in a dark world. Its central message is wonderfully clear: God made us, we rebelled, Christ redeemed us, and we are called to follow him in faith and love. Everything else in Scripture serves this gospel, illuminates it, applies it, protects it. The Fathers show us how.
And so we read it as our fathers and mothers in the faith have always read it: humbly, believing that God has spoken clearly about what matters most, but recognizing that we remain finite creatures learning to understand an infinite God. We read expecting to hear God speak, knowing that he is faithful to meet us in the words he has given.
We read Scripture plainly, but not simplistically. We read it as divine revelation, but also as genuinely human communication. We read to know God’s will, and we find that his will is mostly very clear: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
This is the Anglican way. Not a method that makes everything mysterious and uncertain, but one that trusts the God who gave us both Scripture and minds to understand it, and who gave us faithful witnesses to show us how. It requires work—the work of study, of reading the Fathers, of prayer, of wrestling with difficult passages. But it yields fruit: a faith grounded in God’s clear word, a confidence rooted not in our own cleverness but in God’s faithfulness and the faithful witness of those who have gone before, a way of reading Scripture that nourishes the soul and shapes the life.
And that is more than enough.
Want to go deeper?
Suggestions for further reading on this topic:
On the Early Church Fathers themselves:
New Advent’s Church Fathers collection: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/ (comprehensive free translations)
Christian Classics Ethereal Library: https://www.ccel.org/fathers (another excellent free resource)
Ancient Faith Ministries’ Patristics series: https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/series/patristics
Specific Father’s works to link:
Athanasius, On the Incarnation: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/athanasius/incarnation.html
Augustine, Confessions: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confess.html
Irenaeus, Against Heresies: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103.htm
Chrysostom’s homilies: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/
On Anglican hermeneutics:
“The Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral”: https://www.anglicancommunion.org/media/109002/Chicago-Lambeth-Quadrilateral.pdf
Article VI of the Thirty-Nine Articles (on Scripture’s sufficiency): https://www.anglicancommunion.org/media/109011/article_6.pdf
Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/hooker/epolity.html
On the Vincentian Canon:
Vincent of Lérins, Commonitory: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3506.htm
Contemporary Anglican voices on Scripture:
N.T. Wright’s “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?”: https://ntwrightpage.com/2016/07/12/how-can-the-bible-be-authoritative/
Anglican Compass articles on Scripture: https://anglicancompass.com/tag/scripture/
On patristic exegesis:
John O’Keefe and R.R. Reno, Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible (link to publisher or Amazon)
Frances Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (academic but excellent)
