Christian History Home > Issue 80 > Scripture Saturation
Scripture Saturation
To achieve holiness, believed the early monks, you must soak in the moral sense of the Word.
Patrick Henry Reardon | posted 10/01/2003 12:00AM
A little-known monk living in the Egyptian desert at the end of the fourth century provided one of the most durable interpretive keys in the history of Bible study. The monk, named Nesteros, proposed that all of Holy Scripture is to be understood in four ways or "senses."
He explained this paradigm by examining the various meanings of "Jerusalem" in the Bible.
Jerusalem in its literal and historical sense, said Nesteros, is simply a city in the Holy Land. That is the Bible's first sense, its literal and historical meaning.
Besides this, however, Jerusalem is also a symbol (typos) of the Church, God's redeemed and sanctified people. That is its second or allegorical sense (Gal. 4:24—allegoroumena).
Next, Jerusalem is an image of the redeemed but struggling Christian soul; this is its third or moral sense.
Finally, Jerusalem is that heavenly city on high (Gal. 4:26; Rev. 21:2), the final expectation of our hopes, and this is its fourth or anagogical sense.
Nesteros's "four senses" became ...
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